[leemck]

In 1973 I was 26 years old and for about ten years I tried to build a library that included the fundamental computer books. Your education needs to exceed the narrow field of computer reference books only.

First comment is I did get the Knuth books but I never got the college courses and problem solving work to use them. As Professor Marc Nicolet said: You have got to do the problems to master the subject (referring to his Caltech area of physics).

The second comment is computing is all binary. Go beyond that and learn about fractals, chaos, topology and knot theory. For instance, in Kaufman's Knot Theory, there are obviously true but rigorously unproven theorems in the first chapters of the book.

The third comment is after Turing's paper and Godel's uncertainty arguments, all real world computer programs, no matter how carefully they employ something from a fundamental book, must be tested.