>>5I've glanced through the book and found it boring and overrated. Knuth pays too much attention to the basics and details, like analyzing what it takes to compute a factorial or just welcomes reader to appreciate some useless combinatorial puzzles. The text moves a lot slower than SICP or Norvig's book.
I've found some papers like
http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/alchemy.pdf to be more insightful. Fuck! Even Hofstadter's book would be useful, compared to Knuth's trash.