>When learning a new topic in math, I personally prefer to start with a more formal, terse text. For me, the texts that focus too much on examples and motivatio

>When learning a new topic in math, I personally prefer to start with a more formal, terse text. For me, the texts that focus too much on examples and motivation tend to be chattier Soviet books (MIR Publishers) are notoriously terse and to the point. This is what we used in college, and it has made it difficult for me to read a different style, because the content tries my patience. For example, I couldn't consume Andrew Ng's Coursera ML course, but I appreciated the CS229 recorded at Stanford because he dove directly into the maths part. I didn't want to see slides, I needed to see problem statement, pause the video, work through gradient descent, play the video, and check I got it right. Side note: doing this [pause, working on it, play] has its advantages, it helped avoid a confusion the instructor had in the course with notation, for example, which you had to be sorted out in the later part of the course. As you said, it is a spectrum of content with different styles for different needs and people, but even for the same person, one might need a style at a certain point and the other at another point. I remember in my third year I used some MIT OCW resources because I felt my brain was shot and I needed to be spoon fed on a topic I was so far behind on.