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Comment by davidgrenier | Hacker News Reader

Jeff, I'd be curious to know. Going through TAOCP is on my lifetime-to-do and feel I am getting close to tackling it again however I have no time right now. There's also so many other things I want to go over (some higher order logic, TAPL, PFPL, the Software Foundations books, compiler design and probably won't pass up some category theory being abstract algebra seems accessible to me).

Do you feel TAOCP is worth the time investment or should I just forget about it and tackle something like your book and spend the rest of my time on other topics?

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I'm not sure I can answer that question for anyone but myself. I've worked through quite a few pieces of TAOCP when I've needed to understand a particular topic, but I always find that I lose interest.

But then I've never been able to learn anything by just reading. I always have to have a target problem in front of me, and then I'll read (and get frustrated by) every book ever written to figure out the best way to think about that problem. (Which means I've read a few dozen pages from hundreds of books, and I have pretty huge gaps in my math background -- abstract algebra and category theory being two big examples.)

For some target problems, TOACP has been incredibly helpful, but for most of them it really hasn't. Knuth and I just care about different things.

For the same reason, I can't recommend that anyone work through EVERY problem in my book, either. Find the parts that are interesting and/or useful to you, and work on those. If you get tired or frustrated, work on something else; maybe you'll discover another reason to pick up my book again later. Or not.

Climbing the mountain is much more rewarding than studying the trail map.

As you've already got an answer from Jeff, I thought it might not hurt to add an additional one. IMO, you should ask yourself why you want to read TAOCP; doing it just because everyone recommends it is probably not worthwhile. Read it if you find the material or presentation interesting.

IMO one can think of each chapter (only 6 completed so far) or even each major section of TAOCP as a very deep book/monograph on that specialized topic. The writing is clear and delightful (IMO), but each of them does tend to go rather deep, more than you may care to know about that topic — so each page will require a fair bit of attention; it's not easy going. You'll get an in-depth understanding of a narrow sliver of topics.

Why not read a few of the newer sections and see if you'd like to read more in the same style? Knuth has been putting draft versions online, and they are collected here: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/ — for example, you could read Pre-Fascicle 3B, which is on generating all [number-theoretic, or set] partitions, or Pre-Fascicle 1B, which is on a fascinating (and little-known) data structure called Binary Decision Diagrams. He uses these to solve many interesting problems, different from the focus of typical algorithms books (which would probably dismiss these methods as “brute-force”, as they don't affect the asymptotic complexity but do affect what's practical to do on real computers).

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