> I haven't read any of Knuth's stuff You're missing out on some of the best writing on any topic! Not all Knuth's books are the same: The Art of Computer Pro

> I haven't read any of Knuth's stuff You're missing out on some of the best writing on any topic! Not all Knuth's books are the same: The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) is his mangum opus, an ever-expanding encyclopedic knowledge fire-hose of various computer science topics. But the series of books that are simply "collected papers" makes it easy to focus on something much narrower. For impractical, you may want to start from Selected Papers on Fun and Games. And then he has books like Surreal Numbers, which is written as a story of a couple discovering mathematical notation and deriving a whole system...