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Art Computer Programming

Although the title seems mammoth, 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 presently considered as one of the best books written in the domain of computer programming. The Art of Computer Programming is considered as one of the best texts available on computer and compiler programming. This book covers a mammoth domain (or almost everything) associated to compiler design, complier programming, and general computer programming.

The History of the Book

Donald Knuth is one of the pioneer complier programmers and has contributed to invention of many modern programming languages. In 1962, he began writing a book about compiler design for the user of the computer programmers of the time. Once started writing the book, Knuth understood that the scope of the book should be widen as there are number of topics that needs to be addressed in the book. Although it was plotted as a single volume, twelve chapter book with a couple of hundreds of pages, finally it grown out to be a book with three thousand pages. Once the transition was done from manuscript to the printed papers, the outcome was 2000 pages.

Then the publishing plan was changed for The Art of Computer Programming. Since it was too large to release as a single volume, it was decided to publish in seven volumes. Each volume will comprise of one or two chapters, so the readers can focus on one or two areas at a time. When the volume four was published, the plan was again modified for The Art of Computer Programming. Since volume four was titanic, it was spread 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 means of type setting the book. As a result of this, TeX was produced by him. Even today, TeX is widely used for publishing scientific publishings that have a lot of methematical notations.

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 has included extensive amounts of Assembly as Assembly is the base for compiler programming.

The Responses for The Art of Computer Programming

Once, Bill Gates has remarked about The Art of Computer Programming in one of his speeches. He has referred 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.”

Filed Under: Computer Programming

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