Do you need to people to tell you what to do?<p>Asking other&#x27;s advice is as stupid as judging a book by its cover.<p>If you have studied a tad, or read books in the past, there are ways to efficiently evaluate a book:<p>Read some pages randomly. Think 30s if you liked it. TAOCP is indigest for sure.<p>Then take a topic for which its relevant. Read it. 
Did you learnt something?<p>A) no, either you or him is an idiot. Go to B)<p>B) Was it luck? Reproduce nth time (n being left to your choice and whatever)<p>C) after nth iterations : 
- is something interesting worth learning? 
- can you understand the book (don&#x27;t lie to yourself)?
- do you like reading it?<p>Then look at the tag price. You look at your internal evaluation and buy or not the book according to your needs.<p>I liked reading part of this book, and i grasped the underlying context fast enough to be so bored (trying to build a consistent mapping between algebrae and code) that I never opened it again.<p>In microelectronic you learn to draw your logic on Silicium and wire the logic... It is much more powerful and is one of the key concept of parallelism. Geometric approach.<p>But, this is my subjective opinion of the book. Talent comes with strong balance between opinions and curiosity.<p>If you want to understand better computers I would suggest to take a look at VHDL rather than TAOCP ... if it SUITS you.<p>You should be the master in your choices.