And this shows a huge folly in our industry.<p>Short answer, is the book easy?  Of course not.  Is it dated in approach?  Yes.  Sorta.  What would make it better?  A modern language?  Why?<p>Consider, just yesterday there was someone designing an elevator system using python.  That is literally one of the first examples in TAoCP.<p>Not long ago, there was an article about how linear search with sentinel values is actually faster than binary search for many data sets.  This is, again, one of the first treatments of searches in this text.<p>I&#x27;m waiting for someone to rediscover that you can make a tree for depth first traversal, such that you do not need to use a stack.  Again, one of the early topics in these books.  Curious about different characteristics of Tries&#x2F;Trees&#x2F;Lists&#x2F;Hashes?...<p>Is it worth the time to read end to end?  Almost certainly not.  The math heavy sections are definitely going to scare off a lot of people.  Myself included.  This mainly means to skim the exercises.<p>But, there is a lot to offer in the industry of programming.  Knuth picked an order to offer this information and is going in that order.  The latest topics he is just now getting to are hugely relevant in many endeavors and I recommend people at least be aware of them.