Nostalgia time! When I graduated years ago, Knuth's books were still all the rage because the central themes in the CS departments in universities were fundamentals: algorithms, compiler theory, operating systems and what not. We referenced TAOCP for implementing the priority queue using fibonacci heap for our OS projects. We studied chapters on vol 2 for some of the numerical algorithms, and etc. We read Parsing Techniques cover to cover to understand how to write a parser. We still carefully studied AI: A Modern Approach and the dragon/dinosaur/tiger book. Every once in a while a discussion on Knuth's work went to the first page of HN or Programming Reddit. Then, we got more and more mature libraries, and we rarely needed to understand 10 different algorithms that solve the same class of problems. Consequently, we got fewer discussion about Knuth's work too. Of course, it's super fun to read his meticulous discussion of combinatorial algorithms in Vol 4. It just that TAOCP does not appear as essential to as many people as a decode ago.