For context, Knuth is my first generic recommendation for programming books. My advice is to get them all and read a bit here and there depending on your mood.

For context, Knuth is my first generic recommendation for programming books. My advice is to get them all and read a bit here and there depending on your mood. The older editions are going to be more than enough...and honestly, MIX is probably better than MMIX for getting started. To be clear, I've spent time reading Knuth because I enjoy reading and Knuth is a great book as a book. I only understand a small fraction, but that small fraction grows over the years. I recommend having all of them because you won't get all the way through Volume One any time soon and there are interesting bits in each of them. Volume 2 is the driest but randomness and numerical methods are intellectually interesting for a few hours every now and then. The mathematics of sorting and searching hasn't changed so an older edition of Volume 3 is going to be fine. 4a covers exponential space and is different in that it doesn't contain code. But that's me, not you. Good luck.