The Art of Computer Programming |
The Art of Computer Programming is a comprehensive monograph written by Donald Knuth which covers many kinds of programming algorithms and their analysis. Knuth began the project in 1962, which was originally planned to be one book. The first three volumes were published in rapid succession, starting with volume 1 in 1968, volume 2 in 1969, and volume 3 in 1973. Volume 4 is currently in preparation, the first installment of which was published in February 2005, with additional installments planned approximately twice per year.
Being considered an expert at writing compilers, Knuth started to write a book about compiler design in 1962. He soon realized that the scope of the book needed to be much larger. In June 1965, Knuth finished the first draft of what was originally planned to be a single volume of twelve chapters. This hand-written manuscript was 3,000 pages long. Knuth had assumed that about five hand-written pages would translate into one printed page. The publisher said that it was actually about 1½ hand-written pages to one printed page: thus the book would be 2,000 pages in length! The plan of the book was changed to have seven volumes, each with one or two chapters. Due to the growth in the material, the plan for Volume 4 has since expanded to include Volumes 4A, 4B, 4C, and possibly 4D. Volume 4A is likely to split further, since 7.1.1 and 7.2.1 together are already nearly 500 pages.
In 1976, Knuth prepared a second edition of Volume 2, requiring it to be typeset again. But the style of type (probably called hot type ) used in the first edition was no longer available. So in 1977 he decided to spend a few months working up something more suitable. Eight years later, he returned with TeX, which is currently used for all volumes.
All examples in the books use a language called MIX assembly language, which runs on the hypothetical MIX computer. (Currently, the MIX computer is being replaced by the MMIX computer, which is a RISC version.) Fortunately, there are free GNU MDK available for download.
The famous offer of a Knuth reward check worth one hexadecimal dollar for any errors found, and the correction of these errors in subsequent printings, has contributed to the highly polished and continued authoritative nature of the work, long after its first publication. Another characteristic of the volumes is the variation in the difficulty of the exercises. The level of difficulty ranges from warm-up exercises to unsolved research problems, giving any reader a challenge.
=Critical response=
American Scientist has included this work among the best twelve physical-science monograph of the twentieth century, and amongst the computer science community it is regarded as the first and still the best comprehensive treatment of its subject. Covers of the third edition of Volume 1 quote Bill Gates as saying If you think you re a really good programmer... read (Knuth s) Art of Computer Programming...You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing. Some readers are chagrined at the use of assembly language, but Knuth considers this necessary because algorithms need a context to judge speed and memory usage. It does, however, limit the accessibility of the book to many readers, and limits its usefulness as a cookbook for practising programmers, many of whom are unfamiliar with assembler, and even if they are, have no particular desire to translate assembly code into a high-level language. A number of more accessible algorithms textbooks using high-level language examples exist and are popular for precisely these reasons.
=Chapter outline=
=Outline of Volume 4A Enumeration and Backtracking=
=English editions=
Current editions:
Previous editions:
=Additional references=
=External links=
*[http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html Overview of topics] (Knuth s personal homepage) *[http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf Computer programming as an art] (pdf) Turing Award talk given by Donald Knuth|
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