Disclaimer, I only read the first book. Depends what you want from it. I used the first book to study for my Bachelor's degree final state examinations, and it

Disclaimer, I only read the first book. Depends what you want from it. I used the first book to study for my Bachelor's degree final state examinations, and it served me well :-) In other words, yes it is very academical, in the truest sense of the word. From what you say, that you want it to "mention of pipeline stalls, designing for cache performance, branch prediction, multithreading, etc.", you might find better use of Andrew S. Tanenbaum books. I have only read his Computer Networks [1], but it has saved me at least 14 hours of boring lectures at uni, and helped me with some protocols work. He still does research in distributed OS-es, so would hope, that rest of his books would have same amount of readability and usefulness as the one I have read :) Back to Knuth, if think you have no use in mathematical formalism, or college math in general, you will probably find it little more than intellectual entertainment. There are of course areas where having formal theory of a thing is beneficial when programming, even if you yourself don't apply it (i.e. the chapter on random numbers seems like something everybody touching any code related to security should read, i.m.o) But even then, if you suddenly need to learn more math theory, there are probably better sources than Knuth. As somebody who finished my Msc already, I like it as my intellectual entertainment just fine :) [1] http://www.mypearsonstore.com/bookstore/computer-networks-9780132126953 http://www.mypearsonstore.com/bookstore/computer-networks-97...