As you said, it's dense. Enough so, that few people will read it cover to cover sequentially.
It's challenging, where "challenging" means that it requires living with some bewilderment and frustration while reading it. And anyone who is not as smart and knowledgeable as Knuth will probably experience both to some degree because what makes tAoCP great is that Knuth doesn't dumb anything down.
Over the years, I've found that tAoCP works well without having to dig deeper into the math [or MIX] than I am able or interested in diving...the abstractions are laid out well and understandable as abstractions without getting buried in algorithmic analysis...though the analysis can be interesting.
My take is that if someone is serious enough to try to tackle it, it will give back more than the effort put in regardless of the person's computer science background.
It's challenging, where "challenging" means that it requires living with some bewilderment and frustration while reading it. And anyone who is not as smart and knowledgeable as Knuth will probably experience both to some degree because what makes tAoCP great is that Knuth doesn't dumb anything down.
Over the years, I've found that tAoCP works well without having to dig deeper into the math [or MIX] than I am able or interested in diving...the abstractions are laid out well and understandable as abstractions without getting buried in algorithmic analysis...though the analysis can be interesting.
My take is that if someone is serious enough to try to tackle it, it will give back more than the effort put in regardless of the person's computer science background.