[adolgert]

Knuth's books are a baseline for "how things are done" for many, many areas, so having read them lets you hit par on most holes. Optimizing code for an architecture is very interesting, but it comes after 1) figuring out which ways the math can be stated correctly and 2) calculating the order of computation. Then architecture gives numbers to put into the order of computation. Knuth focuses on the first two, but maybe a few books' worth of focusing on those is understanding them well and not such a waste.