I found that Donald Knuth has made pre-fascicles for Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming available for download. These drafts cover combinatorial algorithms and bitwise tricks before their final book publication.
I’ve curated a list of essential computer science texts that offer deep insight. It features foundational papers on lambda calculus, CSP, relational databases, and early programming languages from legends like Hoare, Knuth, and McCarthy.
I examine Marc Eisenstadt’s 15-year email stats showing a 2.5-hour daily drain despite a disciplined approach. I also look at Donald Knuth’s famous decision to stop using email in 1990 to protect his research time.
I learned that Timsort is remarkably fast, moor replaces bat for wrapping via keyboard shortcuts, --help is a useful agent prompt prefix, and Claude Opus 4.6 solved a problem Knuth studied.
I finished Simon Singh’s The Code Book, an accessible history of cryptography. It was so compelling that it’s the only non-fiction book I’ve managed to read from cover to cover in the past two years.
I've collected several programming theorems that highlight the realities of software maintenance, like the persistence of Perl and the deceptive complexity of CSV. I emphasize that active coding is far more valuable than reading about new languages.