Yeah, this is how I read TAOCP. I was a grad student working on computational chemistry, so I had lots of downtime waiting for code to compile or long calculat

Yeah, this is how I read TAOCP. I was a grad student working on computational chemistry, so I had lots of downtime waiting for code to compile or long calculations to run (and I didn't have the fancy cloud to run tons of stuff in parallel). I got TAOCP out of the library and just read through it from beginning to end. I didn't work any problems and I skipped the "hard" stuff like proofs (side note: that's how I read all math, I read what they're proving, but don't follow along with the proof, I just tuck it away in my head what was proved and then if I come across a problem where I need it then I go back and try to understand it). One day I was working on a problem and I realized that I was storing a lot of 0's in my matrix and I remembered that I read about sparse matrices in TAOCP (this was before you could just go to numpy and make a sparse matrix). So I went back to that chapter and used that to solve my problem. That's happened to me many times in my career now, I remember that I read the general idea in TAOCP and then when I realize I need it, I go back and learn it for real. If you want to be someone who understands computation (using computers to solve real problem), then it's probably good to have "read" TAOCP just to see what kinds of problems other people have encountered and know that there is at least one good solution to them. Then if you ever need to solve that problem, you know where to look for a start. A little more philosophical: a culture needs a common core set of ideas that everyone can reference. When working together as a group, having a set of common ideas is a great shortcut in communicating. I'm not religious, but I see the bible as a historical way that this worked for the western cultures - there was a set of "givens" that everyone could hang their ideas off of. Every field of knowledge needs this common understanding. I view TAOCP as this for the field of computing. There are better ways to solve many of the problems now, or common libraries that provide the solutions, but having the problems named and discussed gives everyone a good starting place to talk. tl;dr - yes, TAOCP is good, read it to learn the concepts and ideas that people smarter than you solved years ago.