> It's not a page turner where you'll read it from start to finish. It's a resource.
I’ve seen other people suggest that, and I always find it surprising. I did read all of them (well, the first three, anyway) cover to cover, and I can’t imagine trying to jump into the middle without having absorbed all of the preceding material first. The book is so full of back references that even having read everything in order I still found myself turning back to re-read sections that were referred to later. I’m genuinely curious, which sections were you able to make sense of “standalone”?
In my small sample size you would be the first person I've met to claim to have read all three cover to cover! That's an amazing achievement.
I don't remember exactly but I've found chapters in the first book on fundamental structures such as trees and sorting algorithms tend to stand well alone.
More recently I've been diving into Book 4, Facile 6 on SAT solvers, combinatorics. I tend to already have some familiarity with the material so it seems to me to stand well on its own.
I really enjoy Knuth's writing style however and appreciate his scrupulousness. The references and indices are top-notch so that if you aren't familiar with the prerequisites they are easily found!
This. IMO Knuth's writing is also a pleasure to read. Some concepts are hard and sometimes I just have to skip some math derivations but overall it's certainly not a dry technical reference (even though it can be used as one).
I’ve seen other people suggest that, and I always find it surprising. I did read all of them (well, the first three, anyway) cover to cover, and I can’t imagine trying to jump into the middle without having absorbed all of the preceding material first. The book is so full of back references that even having read everything in order I still found myself turning back to re-read sections that were referred to later. I’m genuinely curious, which sections were you able to make sense of “standalone”?