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Comment by raegis | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to read them linearly. Volume 2 (Seminumerical Algorithms) starts with an awesome discussion of random number sequences. I think all programmers who use random number generators could benefit from reading it. You can just pick and choose other topics throughout the series.

Also, used copies can be really cheap. Some of the volumes in my back up set were just $20 each, and in excellent condition. Apparently lots of people buy the books and never read them :)

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I finaly had an opportunity to use my box this year for an interview step which was a home challenge. It was about debugging a flowed code to return all valid anagrams of a word according to /usr/share/dict and then propose optimizations. The fix was easy, and after implementing my own ideas, I searched for other approaches online as I might usually do. And only after that I had the idea to look at my TAOC box. And I did find some pertaining material. Not something I would usually do at various positions I had until now, where the shelf, if any, would only contains books on the frameworks, languages and tools used by the team. And when going back to home, there are plenty of other things to do.

Anyway, this helped me I think to go through this step of the recruitment process. My application went through the whole process, and didn't lead to a hire, but I really enjoyed it.

Now in the meantime I got a new job mostly on full remote, so maybe I might take the habit to reach my shelve for TAOCP more often.

I already tried a linear reading starting with volume one, but honestly it's not my favorite prose to go through like that alone. Knowing that you'll be given solutions in the out of date MIX, waiting for an MMIX covered edition come out, plus you might better first go through Concrete Math first, and so on, that is a lot of material to climb. The view up there might be wonderful, but finding the time and attention required can be a great challenge per itself.

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