Now Includes the Long-Anticipated Volume 4B! Countless readers have spoken about the profound personal influence of Knuth's work. Scientists have marveled at the beauty and elegance of his analysis, while ordinary programmers have successfully applied his cookbook solutions to their day-to-day problems. All have admired Knuth for the breadth, clarity, accuracy, and good humor found in his books. Primarily written as a reference, some people have nevertheless found it possible and interesting to read each volume from beginning to end. A programmer in China even compared the experience to reading a poem. Whatever your background, if you need to do any serious computer programming, you will find your own good reason to make each volume in this series an easily accessible part of your scholarly or professional library. These five books comprise what easily could be the most important set of information on any serious programmer's bookshelf. This set now includes Volume 4B, the sequel to Volume 4A, which extends Knuth's exploration of combinatorial algorithms. These algorithms are of keen interest to software designers because . . . A single good idea can save years or even centuries of computer time. Donald Knuth may very well be a great master of the analysis of algorithms, but more than that, he is an incredible and tireless storyteller who always strikes the perfect balance between theory, practice, and fun. [ The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4B, Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 2, ] dives deep into the fascinating exploration of search spaces (which is quite like looking for a needle in a haystack or, even harder, to prove the absence of a needle in a haystack), where actions performed while moving forward must be meticulously undone when backtracking. It introduces us to the beauty of dancing links for removing and restoring the cells of a matrix in a dance which is both simple to implement and very efficient. And it studies the iconic and versatile satisfactiability problem and carefully analyzes various ingredients of SAT solvers. -- Christine Solnon, Department of Computer Science, INSA Lyon This box set includes the following volumes: The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms, 3rd Edition