Title: I recently purchased a boxed set of Donald Knuth&#x27;s The Art of Computer Programming on Amazon ( http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;0321751043 ) based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read.<p>I excitedly started delving into it last night but after an hour or two of reading and exercises I started getting the sinking feeling that I&#x27;d just wasted $178.08.  It seems quite mired in 1960&#x27;s-era academic minutiae and tedious mathematical formalism that doesn&#x27;t seem very relevant to a modern practicing programmer.<p>For all its focus on algorithmic performance I found no mention of pipeline stalls, designing for cache performance, branch prediction, multithreading, etc. which are all very fundamental aspects of good performance on modern hardware.<p>So for those who are practical programmers and have gone down the Knuth TAOCP rabbit hole I ask - was it worth it? Did it give you knowledge and skills applicable to your programming work or was it mostly academic &#x2F; intellectual entertainment?
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