I&#x27;ve read the first volume.  I do not have a math-heavy background.  Knuth&#x27;s dry humor is great.  The scope and effort put into the books are astounding.<p>I did not learn much of practical use for my day-to-day programming.  Sadly, I will probably never read the other two volumes in my boxed set.  They look great on the shelf.<p>The MIX assembly language was my least favorite aspect of the book - and I ENJOY creating and tinkering with toy virtual machines.<p>MMIX (MIX&#x27;s modern RISC successor) will probably be a lot nicer.<p>Perhaps assembly languages are essential to demonstrate the concepts properly. And I understand the arguments against using a popular low-level language such as C. But it sure would have been nice to have a simple and readable pseudo-language for the examples rather than MIX!