It is important to know that these are books for computer scientists more than for software engineers. They are basically mathematics textbooks, about the mathematics of algorithms. They focus on proving theorems rather than implementing useful algorithms.

There is a book called concrete mathematics that is sort of an introduction to TAOCP. If you’re interested in the basics that may be a good place to start. It has a better title than TAOCP in that it explicitly mentions mathematics, but also an equally bad one because it’s very much theoretical rather than concrete.

My degree is in combinatorics. All of the fancy words you’re not a fan of are core ideas (the Petersen graph is really neat). I view The Art… as an academic work for academics who aren’t necessarily excited about the real world (which is my approach to combinatorics). If you’re not one of those people, you’re not interested in becoming one of those people, or you don’t work/research something that needs incredible optimization, you can safely skip it. Once you go into heavy proofs, the utility is very debatable.

TAOCS has a reputation for being very deep and thorough, not for being a good introductory text. One of my professors said that in his (very long) industrial career, he only met one person who actually read the books beginning to end but everyone looks something up in them once or twice.

That has been my experience. I once needed to find out how to solve a very specific problem (I think it was calculating statistical values on an infinite stream). I found the single copy of TAOCS in the office reference library, read the relevant section, and implemented the suggested algorithm.

Why didn't you start with the fundamentals book Volume 1?

You just jumped directly into complex combinatorics and then complained that the material was too difficult.

I find this validating 30 years after I spent weeks banging my head on these volumes. I meekly gave up and was not brave like you who called it what it was: horribly written

Yeah I mean it's definitely a reference volume of last resort, rather than a tutorial you would read cover to cover. Clearly a genius but he explains things as if you already understand them, and can also read his mind.

That said, for a lot of the content the only alternative is research papers and they are even less accessible. I definitely would only use it if I couldn't find answers anywhere else though.

I don't think it's overhyped, at least I've never heard anyone hyping it up so much. I would be happy to recommend you other books if you want :)

I also don't think it's a big deal if you didn't like the book. I don't think even Knuth himself would be upset, really.