If you are at all interested in computer science, read volume 1. If you want to go further after that look at the other volumes. > he told me the book may be

If you are at all interested in computer science, read volume 1. If you want to go further after that look at the other volumes. > he told me the book may be trying too hard Knuth isn't trying to write a novel or something to learn from, rather a concise, comprehensive attempt to cover the field of Computer Science. It's a repository of knowledge. He marks some exercises at 50 which, from memory, means that if you can solve it fully you are in the running for a Turing award. One of the Python core developers was once asked what the developers did in their sparetime: We read Knuth so you don't have to [0]. [0] https://www.norvig.com/quotations.html https://www.norvig.com/quotations.html