It genuinely pains me to say this, as I've got a copy on my bookshelf, but no. Reverence for it is religious/romantic in nature, and neither based on practical

It genuinely pains me to say this, as I've got a copy on my bookshelf, but no. Reverence for it is religious/romantic in nature, and neither based on practical nor pedagogical means. If you want to build practical skills and experience with algorithms, choose a problem domain involving them and dive straight into it. If you want to expand your mind/skills, choose a programming language from a paradigm and do everything in it for a few years. Then once you've got it all figured out, choose a deliberately different paradigm and do the same thing. Repeat for 3-5 rounds. Sure, there's nothing technically or factually wrong with the book. I had to look up some algorithms in it once for a reference and implemented it from that source, and Knuth writes clearly enough, but if someone wanted to learn english, or wanted to know how to improve their english, i similarly wouldn't direct them to read an old dictionary. Edit 1: If i had to recommend books, aside from the observation that there's relatively few that i'd actually recommend with the goal of making one a better programmer explicitly, I've learnt more from lisp books and/or trying to apply languages to project euler or personal projects than I've ever picked up from TAOCP... Edit 2: oh, and trying to improve and implement all the things that people tell you not to bother trying to improve and/or implement...