&gt;TAOCP worth the time and effort?<p>Early in my career, I got the first three volumes.<p>The volume on sorting and searching was the most useful, and there the most useful was AVL trees.  Next, heap sort and the Gleason bound.  Sort-merge?  I&#x27;d known that already, but if don&#x27;t then can learn it there.  Radix sort?  That&#x27;s what the old punched card machines did; in some cases it&#x27;s faster than heap sort (doesn&#x27;t contradict the Gleason bound because that bound assumes that the sorting is from comparing pars, and radix sort doesn&#x27;t do that).  Radix sort could be still be useful in special cases.  Lists, queues?  Obvious.<p>The fast Fourier transform remains important, and some of what Knuth writes about it is good and tough to find elsewhere.<p>Somewhere in those first three volumes are some really good summaries of combinatorial formulas, with some results not easy to find elsewhere.<p>The volumes give some good examples of how to do the math to evaluate the performance of an algorithm -- might need to do that sometime, e.g., for some guaranteed performance in some embedded system -- and if need to do that then it&#x27;s far easier to read at least the start on how from Knuth than reinvent it yourself and likely easier than from other sources.<p>The level of clarity, precision, and quality in Knuth is about as high as those go and a great example for others.<p>That&#x27;s most of what I got from those three volumes.<p>For the later volumes, right, I didn&#x27;t bother.  But, if I have a question that might have an answer in one of those volumes, then, sure, I will eagerly look.