Have you read Euclid's Elements? Did you enjoy the proofs? And the general process? The conclusions in the Elements are what any 10th grade geometry student

Have you read Euclid's Elements? Did you enjoy the proofs? And the general process? The conclusions in the Elements are what any 10th grade geometry student should already know. It's not the conclusions though, but the journey. Some people still swear by Euclid, claiming the Elements helps teach a person how to think. TAOCP is in that vein. As you have identified, it is not a programming book, and it's not a computer engineering book, and it's not really a college textbook either. It is a computer science book in the old tradition, where computer science is treated as a branch of mathematics. It won't teach you to program. As another user said, you should probably be using the algorithm your language's standard library provides. Now, if you want to know why a library's author chose a particular algorithm, the trade-offs between the options, and an open-ended and in-depth exploration of such topics, then this is the book for you. The author of that optimized tree search function you're using probably read TAOCP at some point, so you don't have to.