The title. I have read many technical books (mostly compilation, programming languages & automata) , blogs and whatnot, and recently borrowed the above mentioned book Volume4 (combinatorial problems) from a local library. Just to give a try since Knuth is such a respected person in computer science.

It is by far the most frustrating and maddening book i ever laid my eyes upon. The author doesn't make the slightest effort to explain why something is useful, changes examples before explaining why previous example is interesting or how it shows why X is useful. On page 8, he says that "Graeco Latin squares allowed to François Cretté de Palluel to do with 16 sheeps, what otherwise would require 64 sheeps". How & why ?? No fucking clue. I know i am not the smartest person on earth, but i would love a little hand holding here, you know to explain a concept he introduced 2 pages previously, and gave 3 random anecdotes about.

The writing style is a complete opposite of what I (and I believe, what are most people ) am expecting. If you know something, it won't be useful, and you don't know something : don't count on the book for explanation. I had the physical urge to slap Knuth. It's absolutely maddening.

He then goes on his little hobby to gather 5 letter-English-words, and gives some fancy looking graphs with fancy names (3 cubes, Petterson graph, Chvatal graph). For all what i know, it could be graphs called 42 and graph Blabla. Again no clue how it's useful, nor why it's interesting. He introduces some definitions and theorems.

I am on page 26 (thr book is thicker than a bible) i think i am done. This book will not make you a better programmer, i have no idea who and for what reason could possibly find it useful?

If you think i am overreacting and should continue reading, please tell me so, but i don't expect it to get better

Omg it's sooo daammmn slooow it takes around 30 seconds to bulk - insert 15000 rows

Disabling indices doesn't help. Database log is at SIMPLE. My table is 50 columns wide, and from what i understand the main reason is the stupid limit of 2100 parameters in query in ODBC driver. I am using the . NET SqlBulkCopy. I only open the connection + transaction once per ~15000 inserts

I have 50 millions rows to insert, it takes literally days, please send help, i can fucking write with a pen and paper faster than damned Microsoft driver inserts rows

Are you doing data science? Statistics? No?

Then for god's sake don't use pandas, you just look dumb af when you pull several MB of a package just to load csv. If you find yourself doing that, just stop programming and look for another job

Thanks for attention