I've read the first volume. I do not have a math-heavy background. Knuth's dry humor is great. The scope and effort put into the books are astounding. I did

I've read the first volume. I do not have a math-heavy background. Knuth's dry humor is great. The scope and effort put into the books are astounding. I did not learn much of practical use for my day-to-day programming. Sadly, I will probably never read the other two volumes in my boxed set. They look great on the shelf. The MIX assembly language was my least favorite aspect of the book - and I ENJOY creating and tinkering with toy virtual machines. MMIX (MIX's modern RISC successor) will probably be a lot nicer. Perhaps assembly languages are essential to demonstrate the concepts properly. And I understand the arguments against using a popular low-level language such as C. But it sure would have been nice to have a simple and readable pseudo-language for the examples rather than MIX!