Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

> This is a really nice comment, but I find the comparison at the end so strange. You shouldn't compare reading these books to using social media, a better comparison would be: given a limited amount of time, should you read these books, or some other one?

I don't get what you find strange about comparing reading TAOCP vs reading social media. Your time is limited, and each activity that you choose bears an opportunity cost. Of course it is an interesting question to ask whether you should read another book instead, but I bet that most people waste a lot more time on social media than reading a book that is not TAOCP, so svat's comparison does make a lot of sense in my opinion.

It depends on the user and the usage. In some cases reading these books doesn't yield the best return for the investment of your time. Consulting the literature that Knuth refers to, rereading and working through the examples, writing your own code could give you so much more.

Volume 2 is within arms reach on my desk. After reading the book and additional literature over the course of several years, the book is filled with sticker notes. Over time my usage shifted from reading TAOCP to rereading (and changing) my notes.

> Would you still recommend this book, and if yes, in what circumstances?

Everyone in math/cs should at least know about the existence of theses books. A rough, cursory knowledge of the content is essential, so that one can look up things if there is the need to really understand a specific topic. TOACP should be considered as one of the best and most important/influential science books of the last century.

Yeah, this is how I read TAOCP. I was a grad student working on computational chemistry, so I had lots of downtime waiting for code to compile or long calculations to run (and I didn't have the fancy cloud to run tons of stuff in parallel). I got TAOCP out of the library and just read through it from beginning to end. I didn't work any problems and I skipped the "hard" stuff like proofs (side note: that's how I read all math, I read what they're proving, but don't follow along with the proof, I just tuck it away in my head what was proved and then if I come across a problem where I need it then I go back and try to understand it).

One day I was working on a problem and I realized that I was storing a lot of 0's in my matrix and I remembered that I read about sparse matrices in TAOCP (this was before you could just go to numpy and make a sparse matrix). So I went back to that chapter and used that to solve my problem.

That's happened to me many times in my career now, I remember that I read the general idea in TAOCP and then when I realize I need it, I go back and learn it for real.

If you want to be someone who understands computation (using computers to solve real problem), then it's probably good to have "read" TAOCP just to see what kinds of problems other people have encountered and know that there is at least one good solution to them. Then if you ever need to solve that problem, you know where to look for a start.

A little more philosophical: a culture needs a common core set of ideas that everyone can reference. When working together as a group, having a set of common ideas is a great shortcut in communicating. I'm not religious, but I see the bible as a historical way that this worked for the western cultures - there was a set of "givens" that everyone could hang their ideas off of. Every field of knowledge needs this common understanding. I view TAOCP as this for the field of computing. There are better ways to solve many of the problems now, or common libraries that provide the solutions, but having the problems named and discussed gives everyone a good starting place to talk.

tl;dr - yes, TAOCP is good, read it to learn the concepts and ideas that people smarter than you solved years ago.

The fact that it's not called The Art of Software Engineering is interesting. If computer programmer was a good enough title for Knuth and Thompson then it's good enough for me.