Natik
Natik asked:

Does anybody know approximately how this book's difficulty level might map to a university curriculum? Is it difficult because of the math level, or just many more concepts being covered? I heard you can skim through parts of it and have it still make sense...sort of a beginner here

David I'll take a stab at this: I think TAoCP is difficult only because it might be hard to see the forest for the trees - or rather for the pretty pattern of the bark of one of the trees.
Robert Fishell This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the foundations of computer science. This book was used as the textbook for one of my introductory computer science classes, so it would fit into the curriculum of anyone majoring in computer science. This doesn't teach you how to program - there are no examples in specific programming languages. Rather, it teaches you what algorithms are, and algorithms are to programming what bricks and boards are to construction.

Yes, you can skip around in the book if you want to know how one thing or another is done. You should have good mathematical reasoning skills, but you don't need much in the way of advanced mathematics to understand it. If you've taken precalculus math, that's enough.
Karl Martin Since Goodreads doesn't have a follow post-feature I'll actually have to comment this.
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