I read these kind of books front to back while trying to program the examples and graphs for myself. It's slow going in all but I've gotten great rewards from o

I read these kind of books front to back while trying to program the examples and graphs for myself. It's slow going in all but I've gotten great rewards from only a few books. (These would be 4 in 14 (!) years Strang linear algebra, Greene econometric analysis, Gelman Bayesian statistics and McKay information theory). For me, build once, never forget just works. The thing is, I never feel the need to refresh earlier work after this. Even if I look at my code from a decade ago it just clicks. Did some MOOCs on the side and while I passed those quite well, I didn't retain as much as from the struggle above.