Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4A Boxed Set

This will likely not help you build your startup unless you need a really strong understanding of Programming concepts. In the words of the wise Wikipedia:

"The famous offer of a reward check worth "one hexadecimal dollar" (100HEX base 16 cents, in decimal, is $2.56) for any errors found, and the correction of these errors in subsequent printings, has contributed to the highly polished and still-authoritative nature of the work, long after its first publication. Another characteristic of the volumes is the variation in the difficulty of the exercises. The level of difficulty ranges from "warm-up" exercises to unsolved research problems, providing a challenge for any reader."

For some people, it will be a status symbol. But honestly, you shouldn't be buying these books unless you actually want to learn something. Just saying you have the books will do you no good and is just a waste of paper.

It's all three: theoretical, academic and practical :-) Actually everything is pretty much build up from very basic knowledge.

But beware that it has a high information density and that it is for the mathematically inclined.

To digest in small portions :-)

My experience mirrored this guy's:

I often hear TAOCP described as the series of programming books "that every programmer should read." I think this is simply untrue ... TAOCP was not written to be read from cover to cover ... It's very dense and academic, and the examples are all in assembly language.

(From http://www.billthelizard.com/2008/12/books-programmers-dont-...)

I've read parts of vol. 2, especially about random number generation. I found it in a library book sale for a quarter. THAT made my day. :)

I've found a suspiciously high percentage of the people who have totally! read the Art of Computer Programming are unable to answer even basic questions about MIX, by the way.

I keep them around as a reminder that Computer Science is math. Being able to reason and think mathematically is an important skill for any programmer.

A person can go pretty far doing web work and using scripting languages, but when you get into serious programming (heavily concurrent, resource-critical, real-time, etc) you need to understand the fundamentals.

Having Knuth up on the shelf reminds me to take a second and say, "Hey, think this through some more. Knuth probably figured it out already."

1. Me, at least, and I'm absolutely certain I'm far from unique.

2. There's nothing wrong or status-symbol-y about using books of this sort for reference, and reading only the bits one needs.

A rather superficial status symbol, I'd say: owning a book does not equate to knowing or understanding its contents.

I purchased my copies individually (back when I was a student and I could ill afford them) and, ignoring Knuth's suggesting algorithm for reading the series, read the "interesting" sections quite carefully. I still use them for reference and occasionally find time to re-read parts of it.

I read and understood volumes 1 to 3 front-to-back. I do not think it is that hard to understand, compared to e.g. complex analysis or number theory. Didn't work hard enough on some the exercises, but certainly understood all the simpler ones. I would not recommend reading this to every (would-be) programmer or computer scientist, though. Especially for those wanting to program on 1GHz+ CPUs with 1GB+ RAM, there are things that are more immediately useful. Also, even for the low-level stuff the content of the books is getting seriously dated (e.g. due to the absence of multi-threaded algorithms)

I have to admit I haven't read the books, lower head in shame. It was too expensive when I was a poor student. Interestingly years later at work there were some Romanian exchange students doing summer internship. When they left, we bought gifts for them. A coworker and I bought the 3rd Volume to give to one of them. That really made her day.

I use them as references probably more often than any other books I own. That said, I use the internets an order of magnitude more.

I read the first book and didn't find it particularly good. You don't learn a lot from them. You do learn a lot of irrelevant details (like how his machine language works).

The first three, in detail. I even tried and failed to do many of the higher exercises :-(

I used it as an algorithm reference for memory allocation.

So would I - but only if it looks as beautiful as the real thing.

Anyway, don't most people buy those as shelf decorations?

Sure and what do you get for the price of an iPod?

The life's work of the greatest genius in CS and a set of knowledge that will last you more than your lifetime.

Yes - but the whole of volume 4 is almost a lifeswork! see http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html

That's still in progress (and, given that Knuth is more than seventy years old and still has at least 3 books to go before he will begin to revise them, odds are such a revised set will never be released).