Literate Programming (Lecture Notes) (Volume 27)

This is, indeed, a great book. I had read several reviews and decided to pick this one as my into to Literate Programming. I was not dissatisfied. This is a very good book and I love reading Knuth's works. I have all the volumes of his The Art of Programming (the original 3 volumes I got just before I graduated from Graduate School and have, in the intervening 35 years, found them to be a steady, reliable and wonderful reference...a great source of information. Knuth is a very accessible, readable author. This book on Literate Programming (a series of monographs by the author presenting) follows in the tradition and do not disappoint the reader who enjoys Knuth.One of the things I most like about ordering through Amazon is their teamwork with a wonderful group of 3rd party suppliers. I have not been dissatisfied with any that I have worked through and this one was no excpetion. They supplier was quick and thorough in processing the order and, in my experience, live up to the fine standards that I have always had with Amazon and their partners. I am most pleased with the service and ease of ordring.

required reading for any programmer

Even though technology has advanced considerably, the principles are still valuable. I would strongly recommend this book. I believe anybody from a beginner programmer to advanced software engineer could benefit from this book.

This book is excellent. It was written by one of the pioneers of the computing field. It is the definitive work on Literate Programming. Programmers should really document their code more, but having the code and documentation as one document is pretty extreme - to some. But that is exactly what D. Knuth proposed in this classic book.

This book is a collection of articles Prof. Knuth wrote about programming. He promoted a particular programming methodology called "literate programming", which weaves comments into codes and make them more readable and easier to maintain. This book was published in 1992, but Chapter 4, "Literate Programming", was originally published in 1984, which was an idea way ahead of his time (JavaDoc was first released in 1998, 12 years after the Knuth's article). Chapter one is Knuth's Turing Award lecture and still worth reading for his view on why programming is an art. I was wrongly impressed that Knuth is a very theoretical people and doesn't do much programming. As you would discover from these lecture and other articles in the book, he indeed did a lot of programming and arguably in a very clever and beautiful way, "the program of which I personally am most pleases and proud is a compiler I once wrote for a primitive minicomputer that had only 4096 words of memory, 16 bites per word (pg. 10)." The discussion about the "goto" statement in Chapter 3 is not relevant in today's programming and computer environment. The last few chapters are more like manuals of the WEB and CWEB programs (C version of WEB), which are the programs generating documents and source codes. These manuals may not interest readers unless they are well motivated to write program "literally." One gem should not be missed is is Chapter 10, "The Errors of TeX" (and the accompanying Chapter 11, "The Error Log of TeX). Seeing how Prof. Knuth meticulously documented all of his bugs in TeX is just amazing. Overall this book is more of historical value and for people who love Knuth and his work on literate programming.

I don't have a heart to set any rating for this book really, because either you use it as a document of historical value (here 5/5) or a book you would like to read and apply the knowledge (here is close 1/5). Thus I give 3/5 to set something.This book is about "goto" (sic!) and literate programming. In both fields there is so much progress that the information given here is almost completely irrelevant. Not because the author was wrong, but because ~1970 problems are not problems anymore.I am sure there are books which "survived" and the knowledge still can be applied today despite all the time passed (like for example  The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (Princeton Series in Computer Science) ) but this book didn't.I found only single interesting piece -- the technique of using program counter as a flag for flow control (as you can guess, the irony is, this comes from "goto" chapter).TL;DR -- please ignore the rating I gave, if you are about history, go get this book, if you are looking for some magic, ancient gems which can be still applied TODAY, I am afraid PC trick is the only one.

A great book, suggested to everyone who wants to write better code, better though. A must read to really understand the read power of this under evaluated programming method.

Too old, too out of date. Wish I'd been able to read this 30 years ago but now it's basically irrelevant.