https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject
> For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. How inefficient!
> I've since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. That's what they are designed to be, after all.
This this this this this this this this this this this this
if you're someone trying to learn literally anything sort of STEM, this take should be burned into your forehead for all eternity.
Textbooks that make it easier to get a good understanding of the target material are rare. A common failure mode is to explain things "too fast", so that the reader gains no appreciation for e.g. why some results are nontrivial, or why some particular approaches to reasoning lead nowhere.
I've followed an approach of learning a bare minimum from an area to be able to understand what might be an interesting problem, what sorts of assumptions are typical etc. but _not_ anything that provides you with ideas on e.g. how to reason. Then you spend next two weeks of evenings noodling around the problem which obviously should be interesting. When you get to some more "traditional" way of learning that subject, you'll encounter the chosen problem soon and will be able to confront your approach to it with the one the textbook gives.
