Rating: 
Summary: Bow down to your knees and represent.
Review: Heathen, thou hast reached the Temple Of Computer Science. Knuth be your Bible and Your Bible be Knuth. Read and you shall know. Ask and you shall find. Find an error and get paid 2.56 cents by Knuth himself.
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Summary: Excellence.....
Review: I am a 15 year old CS enthusiast and serious programmer. I had been told about the legendary writings from the one that they call Donald Ervin Knuth and promptly purchased his three volume set.I really enjoyed the volume on sorting and searching and also the chapter on random numbers in vol. 2. All of the volumes contain very valuable information to anyone in the CS field. I am eagerly awaiting the release of the next volumes(Vol. 4 - Combinatorial Algorithms, Vol. 5 Syntactical Algorithms, Vol. 6 - The Theory of Languages, and Vol. 7 - Compilers). I too enjoyed the fact of him not using a HLL to show the examples and implementations of the algorithms in the book. Machine languages do have less abstractions and don't distract the reader from the concept being discussed. Mr. Knuth is a wonderful writer and teacher. I really enjoyed these books and I believe that it would a be a necessary addition to any CS or programming enthusiasts' library. If you are serious about CS, get these books.
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Summary: Great series ! Must have for any programmer
Review: I am just buying another set since my first set got damaged in transit. This is a great book for a programmer and anyone who thinks otherwise, atleast in my humble opinion, is not a computer scientist. It is detailed, mathematical and has tons of great problem organized by difficulty. I can safely challenge anyone who doesn't appreciate this book, to solve some of the more diffcult problems. Great book !!!
Rating:
Summary: "Check it out"
Review: I borrowed volume 2 to implement a special data structure. It helped me immensely in that task. But it wasn't the only resource I used. I could not justify spending the money on this book.
Short of the mathematical treatment, the knowledge certainly wasn't limited to Knuth. In fact, most (all?) of the Art of Programming is a compilation of ideas, isn't it?
I used a variety of resources. I even used to web. There are some terrific animations that show special case tree rotations for AVL trees or red-black trees out there.
Knuth will be appreciated by academics the most. Very specialized programmers, such as embedded designers, OS authors, or database designers will likely be the next biggest group of fans. Application developers will be next in line. They mostly depend on APIs to implement the topics for them. And Rapid Application Developers will hate the book. Don't care. Don't need to know. And they don't. So figure out where you are in that list and that's how much you need this book.
A modern rewrite would definitely nudge me into buying the book. But I just can't force hand on wallet ... to ... shell ... out ... bucks for a book that's already widely available in a variety of formats for free.
PROS:
Likely the best mathematical treatment of a computer science subject you will find. No one ties the practicality of CS and abstraction of math better than Knuth.
Coverage of many core concepts of computer science such as data structures, big-O notation and efficiency, bit wise arithmetic algorithms, random number generators, etc.
Classic work. Impress your colleagues by idly leaving the book around. Bonus points: leave it open AND have a copy of Red Dragon nearby.
CONS:
Not enough pictures. Seriously. I am a visually oriented person. Two pages of tree rotation diagrams are far more helpful than ten pages of prose.
The book is type faced as a college text. The typeface is difficult to read. The exercises litter the book and make thumbing through it a bit annoying.
MIX. This is Knuth's solution to describing algorithms in a universal programming language the audience can understand. Unforunately, the language is assembly designed for a fictional computer. So no one can understand it but equally as well. Actually, any popular assembler experience (Motorola/Intel/PIC) should span the gap nicely. But when's the last time you programmed in assembler? How come? I blew past the MIX examples and looked for better psuedocode elsewhere.
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Summary: A Reference "collection" for all those who love math and CS
Review: I came accross the three books of Knuth while a grad student in CS at William and Mary back in the middle 70's. I am happy to see that those books are still reference for all those studying CS. I regret we have to wait until 2004 to take a peek at volume 4! Needless do say of volumes 5, 6, and 7.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book. Must have on shelf
Review: I enjoyed this series of books tremendously. Detailed explanation of various algorithms. Uses a fictional MIX assembly language machine to show code examples. This is unusual, but turned about to be very very helpful. The excerises at the end are have a rating of how difficult they are to solve, so you can choose which ones u want to tackle. Detailed answers for almost ALL the problems at the end of the book - always a plus! OH .. and there are some problems marked "Unsolved".. If you can solve any of these, you might just be able to get a PhD for it :)
Rating:
Summary: The only thing I'd have loved to see in vol. 2
Review: I have all editions of this Bible of C.S. by the superhacker Don Knuth - if you are serious about C.S./programming/concrete mathematics, you got to buy the latest editions (at least). The number of people eagerly awaiting vols. 4 and 5 (due c. 2003) must be huge. I wish that Ch. 3 (vol. 2) had a more detailed treatment of cryptographically secure random numbers. (There is some coverage, mainly in the exercises). Evidently Don Knuth believes that there is not yet enough material on that subject that will stand the test of time.
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Summary: Just try sorting and searching with out this book.
Review: I have to admit I am poor so I just bought the book I needed. I needed to build a database that did not use any commercial package. This book saved my bacon. I almost did not buy it when all I saw in it was math. But I was desperate and it paid off. Turns out you could not explain it any other way. I use it primarily for balanced trees. I may try some thing more exotic later. I can not tell you about the other volumes but this one will defiantly pay for it's self.
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Summary: Why these books are important to me
Review: I started graduate school in the biological sciences in the late 90s. Biomedical research changed a great deal while I was getting my degree. The increased importance of computers in cutting edge research prompted me to teach myself computer science. I started with fundamentally well written books like Sedgewick's series on algorithms and K&R's C programming language and progressed to more difficult material like stroustrup's C++ programming language or CLR's intro to algorithms. However, the first time I truly felt a deep understanding of computer programming was when I read Knuth's chapter on sorting. The clarity with which he described quicksort, precisely analyzed its running time, and illustrated its behavior in a table put everything into place. Before Knuth, I was frustrated and disheartened. I didn't think it would ever make sense to me. TAOCP is what kept me at the keyboard.
A couple of years later, I've come back to these books and they continue to inspire.
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Summary: Brilliant & Amazing. Unequaled achievement in this field.
Review: I used to be a high-school student when I accidently found a copy of the first volume. It moved my all life. I decided to become a computer scientist at the end of the first chapter. And today, having accomplished this, I still didn't finish the second volume and it has been a long time already. Nevertheless, I couldn't resist buying the third volume. I just hope to live long enough to get to the end of the fifth and last volume of this collection. Thank you Donald Knuth for this brilliant and inspiring work.
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