Comment Re:knuth's art of computer programming (Score 5, Informative) 247
They're kind of dated, because few people do sorts and list manipulation at that level any more. I have both an original edition and a current edition of vols. 1-3, but haven't looked at them in years.
Sure, for the average programmer these days who relies on existing libraries, these probably aren't all that useful.
As a grad student working on a thesis and other papers however, Knuth's books are invaluable for citations. Need to defend the use of a specific algorithm? Cite Knuth. His books were invaluable citation material for when I wrote and defended my thesis a few years back.
This is, of course, good science. You may not need to use Knuth to program your own B* tree, but you have a pretty much universally accepted reference for citation if you use one in your research.
Yaz