There aren't enough stars to rate this. My only regret (and it's a minor one) is that I don't have my old copies, which I gave to a friend when I bought the new and updated ones. The old ones fell open at certain pages, and this volume (and its two companions are new), and will never see the use of the others.

I see that there's a Volume 4A, but I'm not really sure that it makes sense for me to get it, at this stage in life.

Donald Knuth is one of my heroes. ( )

Difficult, instructive, intelligent, amusing and brain-numbing - all rolled-in-to-one in this classic of CS. Buy it, read a page at a sitting and savor it - this is a book read over 5 years. ( )

If you program and you don't know this book, and its companion volumes 2 and 3, it's like saying you live in San Francisco and haven't seen the Golden Gate Bridge. The books are really much more valuable to someone with a knowledge of calculus, and some discrete mathematics. If you are looking for programming cookbooks, don't go here, but if you want to know why binary trees, stacks and queues are used, and who thought of their use first, and their history of development, then read these books.

The above is, of course, a gross simplification. You will also learn how to properly analyze an algorithm - how to design algorithms to compute arithmetic results to achieve the minimum amount of error, how to design a proper random number generator - how to choose the right datastructure for search operations, etc.. More to the point, you will gain the skills to answer such questions on your own.

And most of all, you will see, once again, that the very brightest people are humble and have a sense of humor. The places where this book made me laugh out loud are too numerous to count.