[commandlinefan]

I did actually read all three of the first ones, and attempted (at least) almost all of the exercises. It took me about three years. I enjoyed it, but I will say that the _practical_ benefit of reading through all of these books is questionable; it's more like climbing mount everest and looking down from the top, saying, "wow, I really did it". I did come across a set of all three cheap at a used book store - I don't think I could ever have justified paying full price for the set. The only part I sort of skimmed over was section 5.4 in volume 3 that covers the algorithms for using banks of external tape drives to sort more data than you can fit in memory (taking into account the time taken for the tapes to get up to full speed and whether or not the tape drives support backwards reading). Fascinating stuff, but I couldn't motivate myself to expend as much effort into trying to work the exercises as I did with the rest of the series. Still, reading through TAOCP is quite an experience - if anything, it's a good reality check if you were ever thinking you were about as smart as a person could be.