RSS

Art Computer Programming

Although the title seems 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. In the mammoth and deep world of computer programming. The Art of Computer Programming is seen as one of the best textbooks available on computer and compiler programming. This book addresses a wide-ranging domain (or almost everything) related to compiler design, complier programming, and standard computer programming.

The History

Donald Knuth is believed 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 started writing the book, Knuth saw 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 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 was switched in to the printed papers, it was to be about two thousand pages.

Then the publishing plan was adjusted for The Art of Computer Programming. Since it was too large to publish 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 mammoth, it was distributed in to four sub volumes as 4A, 4B, 4C, and 4D.

By the time the second edition of volume 2 of The Art of Computer Programming was to published, the type setting method used earlier was no more available. He had to think about a new way of type setting the book. As a result of this, TeX was produced by him. TeX is widely used even today for typesetting scientific material with a lot of notation and maths.

The Art of Computer Programming is full of Assembly language code and this has made the book unpopular among the beginner computer programmers. But Knuth has included extensive amounts of Assembly as Assembly is the base for compiler programming.

The Reactions for The Art of Computer Programming

Once, Bill Gates has mentioned about The Art of Computer Programming in one of his addresses. He has remarked 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

About the Author:

RSSComments (0)

Trackback URL

Comments are closed.

Previous Post
Next Post