Ask Slashdot: Have You Read 'The Art of Computer Programming'? (wikipedia.org)

In 1962, 24-year-old Donald Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming, publishing three volumes by 1973, with volume 4 arriving in 2005. (Volume 4A appeared in 2011, with new paperback fascicles planned for every two years, and fascicle 6, "Satisfiability," arriving last December). "You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing," Bill Gates once said, in a column where he described working through the book. "If somebody is so brash that they think they know everything, Knuth will help them understand that the world is deep and complicated."

But now long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino has a question: I've had The Art of Computer Programming on my book-buying list for just about two decades now and I'm still torn...about actually getting it. I sometimes believe I would mutate into some programming demi-god if I actually worked through this beast, but maybe I'm just fooling myself...

Have any of you worked through or with TAOCP or are you perhaps working through it? And is it worthwhile? I mean not just for bragging rights. And how long can it reasonably take? A few years?
Share your answers and experiences in the comments. Have you read The Art of Computer Programming?

Comments

Parts

[Erich]

TAOCP is a great reference. There are some really important things that are pretty good for someone who wants to be a professional software engineer.... 0) understanding how algorithms execute on a processor. While MIX is behind the times, (and MMIX is ahead of the times in many ways) understanding how an algorithm executes on a processor is important. I think Knuth really did the right thing in not selecting the language of the day. 1) algorithm reference. If you need to understand an algorithm, or choose between a family of algorithms, it is often a great place to find the art. 2) The humor is pretty good, at least to me. Done get me wrong, it's on a humor book, but there is wittiness and puns and some running gags... 3) It's always good to have some humility, and reading TAOCP always makes me a little more humble. It's worthy of a place on your shelf.

I have, not worth it

[AuMatar]

Don't get me wrong, Knuth is a genius. If you need to do deep research on sorting algorithms, definitely read it. If you want to do CS research and need to learn how to read research papers, its a good start. But you aren't going to get any deep insights on how to write a good program from it. Its too academic and far too focused on deep research. And even for the topics it does cover, unless you want to do research on how to really optimize the hell out of them you're better off using tutorials written for a more practical level.

Re:Unfortunately no and I have a reason

[lgw]

Reading those books requires high degree of mathematical sophistication, particularly, knowledge of complex analysis, which I lack.

They're just algorithms textbooks. They're hard to read because of when they were written, and the accompanying style. More like pseudo-assembly than high-level pseudo-code.

But, hey, if you want to optimize your search algorithm that uses tape as storage, to take advantage of the new-fangled tape drives that can write backwards as well as forwards, it's the book for you! (Yes, that was really a thing, and an algorithm you'll find in Volume 3: Sorting and Searching.)

Personally, I don't think he does a great job explaining algorithms. I once needed to look up O(n) median for something, tried to understand it from Knuth, gave up on the cryptic text, and understood it right away from CLR (now CLRS). It is an exhaustive catalog, but it's not a great learning tool.