This book represents the first fruits of Donald E Knuth's preparation for Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming. The book's first goal is to demonstrate, through about 30 examples, the art of literate programming. Each example is a programmatic essay, a short story that can be read and enjoyed by humans as readily as it can be read and interpreted by machines. In these essay/progrcms, Knuth makes new contributions to the expositions of several important algorithms and dcta structures, so the programs are of special interest for their content as well as for their style. Tue book's second goal is to provide a concise means for comparing combinatorial algorithms cnd for evaluating methods of combinatorial computing. To this end, Knuth's programs offer standard, freely available sets of dctc - the Standford GraphBose that may be used cs benchmarks to test competing methods.