Reviews for The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1

The average rating for The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-20 00:00:00 Brandon Jones At first, I enjoyed this dense and scholarly volume. Knuth's dry humor is peppered throughout the book, but pops up most frequently in the first few chapters. It seemed at odds with the negative (and adoring) opinions I'd read about the book. I was told (by Knuth in his introduction) that I could skip as much of the math as I liked. So I dutifully skimmed through the math chapter and continued. Then I hit MIX. It's the theoretical computer to which all of the program examples in the book will be written - in assembly language. It's interesting and clever and...awful. Please understand that I have read Knuth's defenses for using assembly language to teach his algorithms. I understand them. And they make sense. But now that I've slogged through this first volume, I can say with certainty that I hate MIX and I hate learning algorithms from MIX examples. "We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!" as Gollum would say. Is it important to understand how a linked list works in memory? Absolutely. Does worrying about the housekeeping of a fictional computer designed in the 1960s aid in that understanding? Absolutely not. Knuth admits that MIX is outdated and he's working on MMIX, which will be a much nicer RISC design. Certainly that would be an improvement. But I still feel a higher-level language (or a formaly-defined pseudocode) could show all of the lower-level concepts without the drudgery of assembly. Let's move on from the assembly example issues and talk about the content of Volume One. For all of the words and symbols, very little ground is actually covered! By the end of Volume One, you'll only have learned about lists (stacks, queues, deques, etc.) and basic trees. Which is not to say those aren't fruitful structures ripe for thorough examination - certainly they are, and Knuth examines them thoroughly. It's just to say that the pace is utterly glacial. In other words, and it pains me very much to say this, it's difficult to justify the time required to get through a book like this if you don't enjoy the MIX assembly puzzles or the higher math problems. I appreciate this incredibly thorough and accurate work the way I appreciate models of large gothic structures created with toothpicks. But while the toothpick model can be enjoyed at a glance as a piece of visual art, The Art of Computer Programming can only be appreciated with careful study. It's really quite difficult to put a star review on a single volume of a (some day) five-volume set of astoundingly thorough scholarship. In some ways, I don't even feel worthy of reviewing the thing. In the end, all I can do is rate the enjoyment and/or personal value of the knowledge I gained from the book. I'll be perfectly honest, the only "useful" (using an extremely loose interpretation of that word) thing I actually remember from Volume One is how to use a pair of stacks to efficiently simulate a FIFO queue. That's a pitiful statement considering the amount of time I put into reading the thing. I own the three-volume set (published before Volume 4A came out). My understanding is that the books get more interesting later on. The titles do sound interesting. But I can't get past the fact that they're going to be chock full of more MIX examples and exercises in higher math. It's going to be a while before I work up the stamina to crack the next one open.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-03-30 00:00:00 Kathryn Cole oh, who am i kidding? i have never read this straight through, but i think i've covered a lot of it over the course of 8 years as an engineer. if i was stranded on a desert island with enough food and water to last the rest of my life, this series of books is what i would take with me. there are so many puzzles in these books that it could keep you occupied for a lifetime. i don't know how one man wrote these books.