Customer Reviews

The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1, Fascicle 1: MMIX -- A RISC Computer for the New Millennium

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Decades ago, when Knuth wrote the first edition of his classic Art of Computer Programming, he invented an assembly language in which to implement the many algorithms of the books. He called it MIX. It was quite representative of the actual assemblers of the time [late 60s]. But time and Moore's Law marched on. The 8 bit nature of MIX grew increasingly outdated.

In response, Knuth gives us here a massively upgraded version, called MMIX. It operates on 64 bit wide data. Yay! Still a classic von Neumann architecture, mind you. But very spiffy. MMIX also has 256 general purpose registers and 32 special purpose registers, where these all are 64 bits wide, naturally. Plus, MMIX lives in an address space of 2**64 bytes of memory.

Unlike the Intel or AMD chips, which are CISC, Knuth opted for a RISC MMIX. So learning the opcodes is very rapid, if you have dealt with assemblers before.

This little text gets you up to speed in MMIX. Consider it as prep for the full volume 4, when that comes out. [Prof. Knuth, it's late.]

But this MMIX book is utterly unlike any other assembler book. It comes replete with programming problems (and answers) of considerable intellectual heft. Conventional assembler books simply don't do this. Their problems tend to be mundane and trivial. This book lets you find surprising conceptual depths hidden under a deceptively simple language. Compare this to chess.

I have to admit I am poor so I just bought the book I needed. I needed to build a database that did not use any commercial package. This book saved my bacon. I almost did not buy it when all I saw in it was math. But I was desperate and it paid off. Turns out you could not explain it any other way. I use it primarily for balanced trees. I may try some thing more exotic later. I can not tell you about the other volumes but this one will defiantly pay for it's self.

Three classic volumes from Donald Knuth. I have the 3rd edition. Once your get pass understanding MIX ( MMIX, 4th edition), it is a great technical read. Bring so much to Computer Science. I used them in school. I use them today.

The Art of Computer Programming is a classic from Professor Knuth.

this is required CS reading and should be required for every programmer.