[yomritoyj]

They are great books about some combinatorial mathematics inspired by programming problems. Not the best investment of time if you want to learn programming itself, because:

1. Most of the time you are not implementing foundational algorithms like sorting or SAT solving. You use mature implementation in libraries.

2. If you are in fact implementing foundational algorithms, then the existing volumes of Knuth cover only a very limited set of problem areas.

3. If you are implementing something in an area covered by Knuth, the books are worth looking into as a reference, but often writing performant and robust code requires considerations not in Knuth. This is because Knuth works with an idealised machine ignoring things like parallelism, memory hierarchy etc. and understandably does not get into software design issues.

[jimbomins]

I'm not sure your point "3." is wholly correct.

They do also go much wider than just combinatorial math.