Art Computer Programming

Although the title looks wide-ranging, we are going to really talk about a book written by Donald Knuth which has been publishing new volumes time to time from 1962 to 2005. In the broad and deep world of computer programming, The Art of Computer Programming is thought as one of the best texts available on computer and compiler programming. This book addresses a mammoth area (or almost everything) related to compiler design, complier programming, and general computer programming.

The History of the Book

Donald Knuth is one of the innovator complier programmers and has contributed to design of numerous modern programming languages. 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 handled in the book. Although it was projected 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 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 consist of one or two chapters, so the readers can focus on one or two areas at a time. The plan for releasing was again changed once the volume 4 was released for The Art of Computer Programming. Since volume four was titanic, it was divided 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 released, the type setting method used earlier was no more available. He had to think about a new style 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 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 referred about The Art of Computer Programming in one of his addresses. 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."



Technorati Tag: art computer programming