If you are young and stupid enough, you don't even realize when a book is too difficult. You just plow through it if you can make any sense of it at all. So f

If you are young and stupid enough, you don't even realize when a book is too difficult. You just plow through it if you can make any sense of it at all. So for me it was TAOCP, a few different theory books by Aho and Ullman, and Spivak's Calculus. I can't say I understood everything in them, but they got me going.