Highly recommended
One little quibble. I have volumes 1 to 4A which come with plain paper dust jackets. This one is now the odd one out with a shiny coated paper dust jacket. It somehow feels slightly wrong to have a series of Knuth books that are not entirely consistent.
I do feel somewhat unfit to judge this book. I’ve never really needed to use combinatorics much in my job, so a lot of the content is well over my head. That said, even the parts I didn’t understand (or more precisely didn’t have the time to study at length to get the understanding to sink in) are a joy to behold. Clearly Knuth is in his element with this subject matter.
To give you an idea of the scale of this book and Knuth’s oeuvre, this volume contains only section 2 of chapter 7. There’s an introduction then sub-sections on Backtrack Programming, Dancing Links and Satisfiability. Many of the problems discussed are based on puzzles and games like n-queens and sudoku. There are also many real world applications to these algorithms.
I have to confess that I haven’t tried to do any of the exercises in this book (maybe when I retire?). The exercises take up a very substantial part of the book. The answers to the exercises run from pages 370 to 655 and the exercises themselves take up a fair chunk of the first 270 pages. That means around half of the book is devoted to exercises. At the risk of blowing a small trumpet, I did send in a small suggestion for an improvement to one of the examples very early in the book, before the hard stuff. I was fairly chuffed a bit later when I received a 32c Knuth cheque.
