The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4A Boxed Set 1st Edition

Since receipt of volume 4A two days ago, I have been dipping into this and that topic via the indexes ...What an excellent authoritive masterful survey - up to 2011 - of combinatorial exhaustive search techniques ...And, some focus on application to business usable sorting and searching techniques ...Excellent and comprehensive chapter on bitwise tips and techniques, and all sorts of other obscure techniques such as resolution and radix sorting that may not be obvious to information systems graduates who don't have to study algorithms in depth.(Must confess I've seen earlier editions of volumes 1 to 3 before!)Donald Knuth is not averse to explaining some things in terms of history or heuristic ... the only heuristic explanation I'm familiar with he doesn't raise are the ones based on the laws of thermodynamics. There is this argument that to understand sorting algorithms one must consider the entrophy gains and losses as the system becomes more ordered and the consequent radiated heat somewhere else in the universe. The related argument from nuclear cell division DNA replication - in science fiction called sometimes the life force - is that when one duplicates information there is a consequent 'life force' heat side effect from the physical law of the conservation of information in quantum mechanics equations. The heuristic explanation then is that if we can minimise the heat from the sorting, we'll have found the best sorting algorithm. Now quicksort wastes more fractions of distinguishment than multi-pass-N-way merge sorting in theory ... so there is more tiny fractions of wasted bits caused by the comparisions. If the exchanges are free and there is unlimited memory then less wasted bit fractions of distinguishment would mean less heat therefore quicksort should on average be slower ... but practical tests proves quicksort faster!That's the problem with heuristics!However, reading through some fo Knuth's essays on exhaustive searching may suggest a solution ... that if we have 64K 32 bit integers, to minimise comparisions we precompute all partitions of the 64K into several thousand sequences of varying length less than length 17, use table driven state machines to optimally sort these sequences in place, and check each resultant multi-pass-N-way merge sort for total wasted bits of distinguishment to find the best breakdown to compare quicksort with. This impossible to conduct experiment would then show the validity or invalidity of applying thermodynamics to the problem ...Unfortunately for me I bought this volume hoping to get a survey of the latest news on the P-NP completeness problem. I will have to await volume 4B for that!

I read this book cover to cover which took me over 3 months, and I was extremely impressed with this collection. Knuth turns computer programming into an art form as the title suggests.There is a lot of history which Knuth makes interesting by stating which algorithms were remarkable discoveries and which were logical extensions of other algorithms. The analysis is much more in depth than other authors especially with regards to run time performance.At the end of each section there are tons of problems to solve, and full answers are in the back. I especially liked how each problem has a rating on its difficulty. For example, a problem with a rating 10 is easy, rating 25 might take an hour... up to rating 50 which is an unsolved problem in computer science.Volume one starts with the first 150 pages being math related to computer science. Then the assembly language is introduced which many of the algorithms are written in. The choice for assembly was made so as to not commit to one specific language's paradigm.Volume two gets into the heart of the algorithms. A lot of interesting things about floating point calculations, and prime number discovery. My overall understanding of computer science improved a ton here.Volume three was my personal favorite. Knuth explains searching and sorting very well. The evolution of the "trie" data structure was impressive. At first he shows a way to make a trie in a way I had never seen before. Then he showed another way, and finally he got to the modern way I had seen. With this knowledge, I understood how the trie was discovered, how it was improved, and then improved again. Every other algorithm book just shows the modern trie without explaining how they got there.Volume four is heavy on math again with a lot about permutations and combinatorics. This was the most difficult of the books I felt but also rewarding.Knuth's writing is excellent. Each sentence is clear and communicates in a way that makes computer history interesting.The box set itself is beautiful and the paper is high quality. I wish I could give more than 5 stars for the review.

Hi,AMAZING . The book is extremely fun !I purchased the book and have begun reading it. I love it. I'm going slow, to better enjoy it! First of all, if you divide the price of the bundle /4 is a great deal. I also recommend to get facsimile 0 (MMIX)The math is so clear and well explained.The fact that he uses MIX (and MMIX) it is fine. I don't see what is the big deal that some people make about this. If you want something in a specific language, there is plenty of books out there...This is a book to learn and appreciate and not to copy code from. Anyways, does it matter if he wrote in c++,c,python or assembly? who cares, it is all the same... if you are reading this book and you are not able to read the mix code, then don't bother.I sow some reviews in the previous bundle that were surprising. Someone claimed that people buy this book to look smarter? Well, I have them in my house, so I guess when I look at them, should I think that I'm smarter ?Also this reviewer claimed that Knuth paid his student to give better review... does he know since what year he stop being an active professor?Anyways, just to rant about that reviewer.

The work of a lifetime of a real genius, a work still in progress. A must have reference for anyone who involves in serious computer programming. This edition comes in a nice boxed set that just calls for volume 4B as a proper companion.