🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec16.231320.12021@tellab5.tellabs.com> jab@tellabs.com (Jeff Brooks) writes:
>
>I've recently completed my first couple of classed towards a Masters in CS
>and was told by one of my professors that Knuth's multi-volume set of books
>"The Art of Computer Programming" are THE classic computer science books.
>
>My questions are, are these books still worth reading or are they outdated?
>The copy of volume 1 I found has a copyright date of 1973, so, should I
>just read them as a historical reference or is most of the technical content
>still applicable to today's programming methods?

Knuth's books always remind me of the great MacMahon volumes in 
combinatorial analysis.

Knuth's vol 1 and 3 are probably the most frequently referenced books in
CS. The contents of vol 1 (math and data structures) are relatively
old if you have the Cormen-Leiserson-Rivest book. After the '80,
the development of dynamic data structures has been beyond the covered
materials of Knuth's chapter 2. The math materials in chapter one are
further elaborated in more recent book "Concrete Math" by Graham, Knuth,
and  Patashnik. I myself like the style of Art'chapter-1 better since
there is no bell and whistles in the book.

I only read a couple of sections in Volume 2, which deals with random
number generation, sampling, computer arithmetics. You may need a better
understanding of number theory to grasp the materials there. This is 
the least referenced volume in the series, I think. But its contents
appear to be the most updated.

Volume 3 concerns about fundamental computing problems in "ordering."
It's relatively hard and deep, but I still love this volume most.
It more or less affects the research directions after 1973, when the
book was published. This volume is probably the most referenced 
book in computer science up to now. The reason? two folds:
    1. If you want to do theoretical research, you can't completely
       avoid dealing with sorting and searching.
    2. If you are publishing papers, you'd better "decorate" yourself
       by citing the book ;-).

If you are serious about computer science, you should read the books
to see the *hard* part of computer science. Ever since I first
read the 'Art series, I find myself learn more every time I read 
it. 

If you are not so serious in getting theoretical stuffs and the
"spirits", get Cormen-Leiserson-Rivest, which is the best *textbook* in
algorithms in my humble opinion.