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I probably won't be as good at explaining as others but I will try. I think the books are like a synthesis of the art, and not designed for the teaching of the regular guy. He has a book to help approach the math called concrete math. Anyway the books start from nearly bare knowledge where the reader creates MMIX a reduced instruction set he made for the books I think, which he uses in the rest of the book to illustrate how machine level works. Anyway he has spent his life working on these and they cover the breadth of general things like algorithmic knowledge. Sorry if I got things wrong

It is a math heavy set, but as you go further on, there is more programming - but still nothing like the programming that you and I would do. He's focused on hyper-optimizing sorting routines, random number generators, hashmaps, and high-precision arithmetic. It's actually really fascinating stuff, and the sort of thing you just don't really see anywhere else (for example, did you know you can actually test the randomness of a random number generator?) But yes, he's more focused on the math behind computer science than the programming itself; besides his elevator simulator, I think the longest program in the entire first three volumes was his AVL tree implementation, which is still something that most of us encounter in data structures 101 nowadays.

> I was expecting more along the lines of actual code like assembly

You mean like the MIX (and later MMIX) assembly code used extensively throughout the books?