The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set

Rating:
Summary: If you can't stand the heat...
Review: When I first started reading Vol#1 in 1970, I was throughly ignorant of Computer Science. I could merely program in Assembly, FORTRAN, and SAIL (a variant of ALGOL, then used in AI research). In the intervening years I have learned and used dozens of computer languages, earned a Master's and two Doctorate's and became a Director of CS at MIT (EE/CS) and Stanford (CSLI). I completely wore out a Vol#1 and applied significant wear on #2 and #3. While there are hundreds (if not thousands) of other computer books in my head, THESE produced True Understanding. Not for wimps or ignorant wannabe's or Micros**t style "programmers". O'Reilly publishes great stuff "In a Nutshell", but sometimes you want (or need) to go deep. Here's the Real Stuff.

Rating:
Summary: My two cents
Review: Yes, using MIX is all wrong. Psuedo-code that's intuitively obvious would save
us so much trouble. But, why not a "TAoCP in FORTRAN-90",
a "TAoCP" in APL, a "TAoCP" in COBOL, a "TAoCP" in BASIC,
a "TAoCP" in LISP, a "TAoCP" in ALGOL, a "TAoCP in Ada", a "TAoCP in C", a
"TAoCP in Java", etc. ?? Think of the money to be made re-selling it in every
possible langauge if there's a market for it? I might even do it myself and
make some $. Actually, there's no need for a Visual Basic version, etc. because
I/O, etc. is not the issue. This set is about art, about *algorithms*, so most of
the high level language specific aspects are irrelevant (except for recursion,
details like garbage collect, inheritance, polymorphism...). Equally irrelevant is
worrying about efficient memory usage and the like. Today, memory, disk
space, etc. are not scare resources. While (being from the old school) I don't
believe in wasteful code, all people really want today out of algorithms is
optimal speed. Time and CPU power are the only resources that is still
constraints. Discussions about sort algorithms which optimize for anything
else (memory space, etc.) are pointless if they aren't also the most time
efficient. We don't care! Also, unless you work for the US Census or Social
Security Administration, you don't care about hardware devices like tape drives,
so those algorithms are just theoretical mind games. Anyway, please rewrite
this set in a practical high level psuedo-code with time optimal algorithms
only. But only the timeless (pun-intended) universally necessary algorithms
that are always going to be useful. Stuff like searching, data structures,
hashing, trade offs between techniques. In the future all people will want are
parallel processing algorithms for distributed environments and perhaps
eventually quantum computing algorithms for a language built on a CPU which
only processes QBits. One final thing: wasn't there originally
supposed to be 7 volumes and only these 3 were completed? What ever
happened to the rest? Why were they abandoned? I guess I never heard.

Rating:
Summary: My two cents
Review: Yes, using MIX is all wrong. Psuedo-code that's intuitively obvious would save
us so much trouble. But, why not a "TAoCP in FORTRAN-90",
a "TAoCP" in APL, a "TAoCP" in COBOL, a "TAoCP" in BASIC,
a "TAoCP" in LISP, a "TAoCP" in ALGOL, a "TAoCP in Ada", a "TAoCP in C", a
"TAoCP in Java", etc. ?? Think of the money to be made re-selling it in every
possible langauge if there's a market for it? I might even do it myself and
make some $. Actually, there's no need for a Visual Basic version, etc. because
I/O, etc. is not the issue. This set is about art, about *algorithms*, so most of
the high level language specific aspects are irrelevant (except for recursion,
details like garbage collect, inheritance, polymorphism...). Equally irrelevant is
worrying about efficient memory usage and the like. Today, memory, disk
space, etc. are not scare resources. While (being from the old school) I don't
believe in wasteful code, all people really want today out of algorithms is
optimal speed. Time and CPU power are the only resources that is still
constraints. Discussions about sort algorithms which optimize for anything
else (memory space, etc.) are pointless if they aren't also the most time
efficient. We don't care! Also, unless you work for the US Census or Social
Security Administration, you don't care about hardware devices like tape drives,
so those algorithms are just theoretical mind games. Anyway, please rewrite
this set in a practical high level psuedo-code with time optimal algorithms
only. But only the timeless (pun-intended) universally necessary algorithms
that are always going to be useful. Stuff like searching, data structures,
hashing, trade offs between techniques. In the future all people will want are
parallel processing algorithms for distributed environments and perhaps
eventually quantum computing algorithms for a language built on a CPU which
only processes QBits. One final thing: wasn't there originally
supposed to be 7 volumes and only these 3 were completed? What ever
happened to the rest? Why were they abandoned? I guess I never heard.

Rating:
Summary: My two cents
Review: Yes, using MIX is all wrong. Psuedo-code that's intuitively obvious would save
us so much trouble. But, why not a "TAoCP in FORTRAN-90",
a "TAoCP" in APL, a "TAoCP" in COBOL, a "TAoCP" in BASIC,
a "TAoCP" in LISP, a "TAoCP" in ALGOL, a "TAoCP in Ada", a "TAoCP in C", a
"TAoCP in Java", etc. ?? Think of the money to be made re-selling it in every
possible langauge if there's a market for it? I might even do it myself and
make some $. Actually, there's no need for a Visual Basic version, etc. because
I/O, etc. is not the issue. This set is about art, about *algorithms*, so most of
the high level language specific aspects are irrelevant (except for recursion,
details like garbage collect, inheritance, polymorphism...). Equally irrelevant is
worrying about efficient memory usage and the like. Today, memory, disk
space, etc. are not scare resources. While (being from the old school) I don't
believe in wasteful code, all people really want today out of algorithms is
optimal speed. Time and CPU power are the only resources that is still
constraints. Discussions about sort algorithms which optimize for anything
else (memory space, etc.) are pointless if they aren't also the most time
efficient. We don't care! Also, unless you work for the US Census or Social
Security Administration, you don't care about hardware devices like tape drives,
so those algorithms are just theoretical mind games. Anyway, please rewrite
this set in a practical high level psuedo-code with time optimal algorithms
only. But only the timeless (pun-intended) universally necessary algorithms
that are always going to be useful. Stuff like searching, data structures,
hashing, trade offs between techniques. In the future all people will want are
parallel processing algorithms for distributed environments and perhaps
eventually quantum computing algorithms for a language built on a CPU which
only processes QBits. One final thing: wasn't there originally
supposed to be 7 volumes and only these 3 were completed? What ever
happened to the rest? Why were they abandoned? I guess I never heard.