Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

I recently purchased a boxed set of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321751043 ) based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read.

I excitedly started delving into it last night but after an hour or two of reading and exercises I started getting the sinking feeling that I'd just wasted $178.08. It seems quite mired in 1960's-era academic minutiae and tedious mathematical formalism that doesn't seem very relevant to a modern practicing programmer.

For all its focus on algorithmic performance I found no mention of pipeline stalls, designing for cache performance, branch prediction, multithreading, etc. which are all very fundamental aspects of good performance on modern hardware.

So for those who are practical programmers and have gone down the Knuth TAOCP rabbit hole I ask - was it worth it? Did it give you knowledge and skills applicable to your programming work or was it mostly academic / intellectual entertainment?

TAOCP is not to learn programming or to cover everything modern. It is for the intellectual exercise, for widening the mind. And that is where its beauty lies.

The term programming here is used with the same semantic definition as "dynamic programming" or "linear programming". Don't expect the book to touch on how to code fast algorithms, rather expect Knuth to teach you the inner workings of the algorithms regardless of their implementations.

Computer science and software development are usually thought to be the same by non computer scientists, but in reality computer science is basically applied mathematics. Expect a lot of it.

> based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read.

A while back, I was joking with some friends that TAoCP is to the programming world what Finnegans Wake is to English literature: you're not supposed to read it, nobody's ever actually read it. We all just say we've read it, talk about how brilliant it is, and place it prominently on our office bookshelves to silently humblebrag to anyone who drops by. Sorry you had to spend $178.08 on that lesson, mate.

No offense, but you really should have done some research before you plunked down the cash... its exactly what you say it it is a foundation computer science book. literally.