The pure-math focus is what made it a slog for me to get through, though I'm clearly not the intended audience. I was 20+ years out of college when I first read

The pure-math focus is what made it a slog for me to get through, though I'm clearly not the intended audience. I was 20+ years out of college when I first read it and it had been over a decade since the last time I'd had any reason to think at all about many of the areas of math it takes as a given that the reader knows like the back of their hand. To be fair, I would have been more comfortable with the examples if I'd read the book in my first year of college, with high-school calculus still fresh in my mind. But as it was, I spent way more time reading Wikipedia pages about the math concepts in the examples than I spent thinking about the concepts the book was trying to use those examples to illuminate. It was worth the read. I just think with a wider variety of examples, I could have gotten the exact same benefit with far less extraneous effort.