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What is The Art of Computer Programming?

Although the title looks broad, we are going to actually talk about a book written by Donald Knuth which has been publishing new volumes time to time from 1962 to 2005. The Art of Computer Programming is currently considered as one of the best books written in the area of computer programming. This book covers a vast (or almost everything) related to compiler design, complier programming, and general computer programming.

The History

Donald Knuth is considered as one of the experts in writing compilers. In 1962, he started writing a book about compiler design for the user of the computer programmers of the time. Once the exercise was started, Knuth realized that the scope needs to be wide as there are many concerns to be addressed in his book. Although it was planned as a single volume, twelve chapter book with a couple of hundreds of pages, finally it turned out to be a book with three thousand pages. Once the manuscript is converted in to the printed papers, it was to be about two thousand pages.

Then the publishing plan was changed for The Art of Computer Programming. Instead of publishing it as a single volume, the book was to be published in seven volumes. Each volume will consist of one or two chapters, so the readers can concentrate on one or two areas at a time. When the volume four was published, the plan was again changed for The Art of Computer Programming. Since volume four was massive, it was divided in to four sub volumes as 4A, 4B, 4C, and 4D.

When Knuth was preparing for the second edition of Volume 2 of The Art of Computer Programming, the old type setting method was no longer available. He had to think about a new way of type setting the book. As a result of this, TeX was developed by him. TeX is widely used even today for typesetting scientific material with a lot of notation and mathematics.

The Art of Computer Programming is full of Assembly language code and this has made the book unpopular among the novice computer programmers. But Knuth emphasizes the importance of Assembly language when it comes to compiler designing.

The Responses

Once, Bill Gates has mentioned about The Art of Computer Programming in one of his speeches. He has mentioned that; ‘If you think you’re a really good programmer, read The Art of Computer Programming. You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing.’

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