There is no universal answer. Try it. Read a few random sections from the first three books. If you cannot put it down, this series is for you. Otherwise, I wou

There is no universal answer. Try it. Read a few random sections from the first three books. If you cannot put it down, this series is for you. Otherwise, I would skip it. Personally, I think the TeX (that Knuth designed because he could not typeset the TAOCP to his liking) is a much more valuable side effect of Knuth writing the TAOCP than the books themselves, but this is not a popular opinion, at least within my Stanford-educated friends.