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

Read the first volume

[guruevi]

It's really great reading if you do stuff like program low-level (think C, Assembler), efficient programming or do stuff close to the hardware level (such as microprocessors). It describes the very low level of a program and a computer.

If you're into a higher level of programming (Java, C#, Python etc), unless you're building libraries for it, it is probably going to confuse you, most of the 'hard stuff' is (double precision, floating point, sorting and searching through lists ...) abstracted away. Obviously 'someone' has to know how it works in the end, someone has to write the compilers, I haven't started on the rest of the volumes because that's not "me".

You should understand how computers work before you start reading these, I've been in the 'business' for 20 years, I've read it 3 times just to get a basic grasp on the first volume.

Maybe

[kwerle]

I wasn't sure if I'd read 'em. I know a friend/colleague (who I regard highly) who has - and I think he thinks highly of them. But he also has terrible taste in movies.

A quick google search landed me at http://broiler.astrometry.net/...

I have not read it.

I've been coding professionally for 25-30 years, depending on how you count. I studied CS in college. I've read a few outstanding books on the subject since then.

I don't have the patience for these, and I suspect I'm not going to miss out on much.

On the other hand, I long ago came to the conclusion that I'm really not interested in low level code. Give me a nice high level language with nice high level functions and features and I'm a happy coder. That's not to say that I don't understand O notation or the costs behind the complexity - but it is to say that I know when to use a drill and when to use a power saw - but I don't want to build either of 'em.

Maybe you're into the nitty gritty. Or maybe you like bad movies.

Check your local tech library and see if you can check out a copy. Or ebay 'em for $20-40/volume. Or if the pdf strikes your fancy, maybe take the plunge.

Re: Unfortunately no and I have a reason

[RabidReindeer]

I can't say I've ever read Knuth in the literary sense. It's more of the ultimate reference.

Thankfully, I no longer have to construct sorts, searches, random number generators, etc. every time I write a program, since modern-day language systems come pre-supplied. However, someone has to implement those pre-supplied algorithms, and that someone almost certainly referenced Knuth. He has provided a concise, well-explained collection of analyses, discussions and sample implementations of many of the most important functions needed by almost everyone in the software development field.

The downside of it is MIX. I understand the reason Knuth created MIX, but MIX is an assembly language and not even a commonly-used one (and intentionally so). I know that there are many who think that the purpose of computers is to run machine (assembly) language, but they're wrong.

The purpose of computers is to run software. How it runs the software is secondary. You can see this in the fact that some machines include in their instruction set specialized functions related to specific abstract features. The Prime Computer instruction set had machine-language implementations of the FORTRAN 3-way branch. I think it was Honeywell that had an OS task dispatcher function implemented as a machine-language instruction. The Inter iAPX432 was designed to run Ada, the IBM System/360 had the Translate instructions, and the IBM zSeries has a major subset of the Unix stdlib implemented as CISC instructions, including a few of the Knuth algorithms.

Keeping software as a set of bits corresponding to primitive functions is convenient for implementing von Neumann machines, but it should be realized that it's the means and not the end, and when scaled, tends to lose the abstract picture in the minutae. If minutae were the end of it, one should be programming microcode and manually switching gates - on many machines, the "machine language" is itself an abstraction interpreted via microcode.

I've often complained that one of the biggest annoyances in IT is that you can pop out a prototype GUI in a day or 2 and everybody thinks it should go to full production next Thursday, where no one in their right mind would ever expect a scale cardboard model of a building or bridge to be ready for use in such time.
But there's a similar break in education in that in most cases CIS courses use a "practical" language instead of an abstract one.

While assembly language was very common when Knuth wrote Volumes I-III, he was aware that there was no universal high-level language any more that there was a universal low-level one, which was another reason he invented MIX. Even academically-inclined languages such as Modula ultimately detoured into practical use, warping their abstraction. And, although ideological purity makes me projectile-vomit, when you're dealing with abstract concepts, I prefer to keep things truly abstract. Otherwise it warps one's approach to later solutions.

Djisktra did. in fact attempt an abstract high-level language in his "A Discipline of Programming", although it has some odd warts of its own. Personally, I'd vote for Ada, because while the last time I actually ran Ada, it nearly burned out the bearings on a mid-line IBM mainframe, it is the only common language I know where values and functions are assigned ranges and domains - an essential concept that is taught at the very beginning of differential calculus classes, but not nearly well-stressed enough in most CIS curricula. Were it otherwise, perhaps fewer satellites would have been destroyer.

Ada, incidentally, is part of the gcc/gnat toolset available on almost any Linux development system and modern-day PCs are considerably more powerful than a 1990 mid-level IBM mainframe (but then again, probably so are most cellphones), so anyone who's curious can explore.