I'm looking forward to this. I can't claim to have rigorously done every exercise, but I did read the books closely enough to know what was in there if I ever need to, say, write a garbage collector.
The real reason to read them, though, is because roughly every third page will have something you just have to play with, like the neat things in the part on circular lists (sorry to be vague, it's been a few years). Buy it: there's so much in there you're guaranteed to find something fascinating.
I've also read volumes I-III closely enough to do the easiest problems, and would like to find the time to go back and perhaps study some of the more interesting parts in more depth.
Knuth gets accused of being abstruse, but compared to most math books I've read, he's very clear. Moreover, he has a genuine unpretentious fascination with the things about which he's writing, and that enthusiasm comes through in his writing.
For that reason I'll be buying and enjoying the fourth volume, although I'd like to wait until all three "sub" volumes are published so I can get them in a box.
Unfortunately, though, I don't think Knuth would be a good reference for garbage collection anymore. That particular problem (and several others covered in the books) have moved so quickly that Knuth's descriptions haven't aged well. His most advanced example of GC was a crude mark-and-sweep system, which would be horribly archaic if implemented today.
PS: I had occasion a while back to implement a random number generator that produced numbers from a normal distribution. It was a lot of fun to crack Volume II open and use it as my reference (after poking around a bit to make sure the information wasn't obsolete).
Hopefully, if I am writing a garbage collector from scratch, it won't be in a context where performance matters. :) I thought the best part of that section was that the garbage collector ran in constant space, which makes sense as a requirement but isn't something I had thought about before.
> Knuth gets accused of being abstruse, but compared to most math books I've read, he's very clear. Moreover, he has a genuine unpretentious fascination with the things about which he's writing, and that enthusiasm comes through in his writing.
I totally agree. I guess the complaints are because where other books just say "see? get it?", TAOCP keeps going, down to measuring the complexity (not the order of complexity, actually counting how many times each instruction gets executed, which I think is why he uses MIX instead of a higher-level language).
. . . Man, now I want to drop Elements of Computing Systems and go back and read volume I again.
The real reason to read them, though, is because roughly every third page will have something you just have to play with, like the neat things in the part on circular lists (sorry to be vague, it's been a few years). Buy it: there's so much in there you're guaranteed to find something fascinating.