Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer. The program is also viewed as a hypertext document, rather like the World Wide Web. (Indeed, I used the word WEB for this purpose long before CERN grabbed it!) This book is an anthology of essays including my early papers on related topics such as structured programming, as well as the article in The Computer Journal that launched Literate Programming itself. The articles have been revised, extended, and brought up to date.

Table of Contents:

   1. Computer programming as an art [P68]
   2. Structured programming with go to statements [P67]
   3. A structured program to generate all topological sorting arrangements [P65]
   4. Literate programming [P109]
   5. Programming pearls: Sampling [Q78]
   6. Programming pearls, continued: Common words [Q79]
   7. How to read a WEB [from TeX: The Program]
   8. Excerpts from the programs for TeX and METAFONT [from Computers & Typesetting, volumes B and D]
   9. Mathematical writing [from Mathematical Writing]
  10. The errors of TeX [P124]
  11. The error log of TeX [P124, with new material]
  12. An example of CWEB [never before published]
  13. Further reading: A comprehensive bibliography of Literate Programming [never before published]

Publisher: CSLI Lecture Notes
Author: Donald E. Knuth
Platform: Programmimg

Amazon Review:
As Knuth himself says, it is impossible for any one person to keep up with all the research in computer science, but these 3 volumes do a remarkably good job of distilling the most important results and explaining them with mathematical rigor.

Each volume contains 2 chapters. Ch. 1, Basic Concepts: mathematical foundations and a description of MIX, a hypothetical machine (now available in software emulations). Ch. 2, Information Structures: lists, trees, memory allocation, garbage collection. Ch. 3, Random Numbers: how to produce series of "random" numbers and test their statistical properties. Ch. 4, Arithmetic: algorithms for integer and floating-point arithmetic. Ch. 5, Sorting: both in memory and on disks or tapes. Ch. 6, Searching: sequential, binary, hashing.

Despite the detailed coverage of the topics, which often involves esoteric mathematical notation, the author's lively style makes the algorithms and the main theoretical results relatively easy to grasp. If all you care about is getting a program to run, buy another book; but if you really want to understand how and why software works, there's nothing quite like this.

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
Author: Donald E. Knuth
Platform: Programming