Coming from someone who's been writing one book on and off for the past quarter-century, this seems a bit of an understatement. But when you consider that most of Knuth's work has been devoted to just that -- figuring out how much time things like computer programs take -- and the statement takes on new (and slightly disingenuous) meanings.

"I'm getting toward being able to take up Volume 4 full time," Knuth says. "I'm writing little snippets. I wrote a sentence just the other day."

"Volume 4," of course, refers to the long-awaited next installment of Knuth's masterwork, "The Art of Computer Programming." Less a set of instruction manuals than a kind of analytic philosophy of programming, the books -- which first appeared in the 1960s -- lay out principles both broad and specific to guide computer programmers toward greater efficiency. So comprehensive are the texts that the Jargon File of hacker slang offers a definition of the word "Knuth": "Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms," and goes on to recommend a safe response to any question for which you don't have a ready answer: "I think you can find that in Knuth."

Time was when such a comment would have the curious programmer dusting off "Fundamental Algorithms" and "Sorting and Searching" (Volumes 1 and 3 of "Knuth"), which were required reading in computer science courses for decades. But modern keyboard jocks no longer worry about things like saving 11 microseconds in each iteration of a binary tree search (if they even know what a binary tree is). Instead, they spend their time assembling prefab software components and designing graphical user interfaces to wow clients. Some "write" whole systems having never even seen a line of code. To them, Knuth, now professor emeritus of the art of computer programming at Stanford University, is irrelevant, abstruse and bothersome because he illustrates concepts in machine code, the lowest-level programming language and the hardest to read.

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