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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> This programming bible earned a famous comment from Bill Gates: "It took incredible discipline, and several months, for me to read it."

I know he's a trillionaire and all and probably smarter than me but still - as somebody who spent a full three years reading and working through the problems in the first three books, I wonder how deep an understanding he could really have walked away with after just a few months.

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I believe that quote just references Vol 1, not 2 and 3 so 'several months' it's doable.

... Without doing the proofs.

He was in math 55a in Harvard, it was considered the hardest math undergrad course in the country back then. So I think it's maybe possible for him.

I took Math 55. There is no way any of my fellow students (or anyone else for that matter) could meaningfully work through the full Art of Computer Programming (or even one of the volumes) in “several months”, even working on it full time, except in some similar way to my grandfather “seeing all the art” in the Louvre in a few hours.

That's amazing you did that, maybe he meant book one. I read where he was working on early compilers also, so maybe he had some odd domain knowledge.

Enough seems to be the answer?

I did a google search of Art of Computer Programming and see a ton of math problems. I was expecting more along the lines of actual code like assembly or machine code or something . Like actual code. How is summing an infinite series supposed to help me code better (summing the series is much easier, ill grant you that..combining ajax +css+php is hard )

> I was expecting more along the lines of actual code like assembly

You mean like the MIX (and later MMIX) assembly code used extensively throughout the books?

I probably won't be as good at explaining as others but I will try. I think the books are like a synthesis of the art, and not designed for the teaching of the regular guy. He has a book to help approach the math called concrete math. Anyway the books start from nearly bare knowledge where the reader creates MMIX a reduced instruction set he made for the books I think, which he uses in the rest of the book to illustrate how machine level works. Anyway he has spent his life working on these and they cover the breadth of general things like algorithmic knowledge. Sorry if I got things wrong

It is a math heavy set, but as you go further on, there is more programming - but still nothing like the programming that you and I would do. He's focused on hyper-optimizing sorting routines, random number generators, hashmaps, and high-precision arithmetic. It's actually really fascinating stuff, and the sort of thing you just don't really see anywhere else (for example, did you know you can actually test the randomness of a random number generator?) But yes, he's more focused on the math behind computer science than the programming itself; besides his elevator simulator, I think the longest program in the entire first three volumes was his AVL tree implementation, which is still something that most of us encounter in data structures 101 nowadays.

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