OP is trying to get into CS, so they need something that's clear and approachable. By your own admission, it's possible even for experienced people to be stumped by TAOCP. It's simply too vast and too difficult for a beginner to finish. This fetishizing of difficult things doesn't help anyone, least of all people trying to get into the field.
The failure mode to watch out for here is not OP getting developing a small misconception about something, but that he finds the field too intimidating to continue.
It's far more likely that a beginner has success with the other suggestions from this thread - like Nand2Tetris, which is clear, explains the fundamentals, is accurate and most importantly, fun.
Knuth is clear and approachable. It's just not dumbed down. The theory that a beginner should 'finish' requires dumbing down. And then they haven't really finished anything. At it's core, your position infantalizes the OP instead of treating them as a full fledged intellect simply lacking knowledge.
Nand2Tetris is a great resource. There are lots of great resources: Let's build a compiler, SICP, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Code Complete, Code, etc. and on and on. What to choose is the OP's problem.
Nothing is as robust as Knuth. It's stood up longer than most Hacker News readers have been alive. And is still keeping up...or rather still at the sharp edge. The first edition of Volume I is more than fifty years old and still entirely relevant. Binary trees, queues, and stacks haven't changed. Neither has the math.
What has changed is that teaching computer science has become an industry. It perpetuates itself via gatekeeping. By withholding knowledge. An industry that parcels out knowledge in semesters. But CS is a lifetime field...Knuth started in 1962.
OP is trying to get into CS, so they need something that's clear and approachable. By your own admission, it's possible even for experienced people to be stumped by TAOCP. It's simply too vast and too difficult for a beginner to finish. This fetishizing of difficult things doesn't help anyone, least of all people trying to get into the field.
The failure mode to watch out for here is not OP getting developing a small misconception about something, but that he finds the field too intimidating to continue.
It's far more likely that a beginner has success with the other suggestions from this thread - like Nand2Tetris, which is clear, explains the fundamentals, is accurate and most importantly, fun.