Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

Donald Knuth

Of all the subjects of this book, Donald Knuth perhaps least needs an introduction. For the past four decades he has been at work on his multivolume masterwork The Art of Computer Programming, the bible of fundamental algorithms and data structures, which American Scientist included on its list of the top 12 physical-sciences monographs of the century, in the company of works by Russell and Whitehead, Einstein, Dirac, Feynman, and von Neumann. He popularized the use of asymptotic (a.k.a. Big-O) notation in analyzing algorithms, invented LR parsing, and defended goto statements from Dijkstra's criticism.

But he is not simply a theorist. ...