Obviously I've not looked at all of them but my main problem (especially with language books) is that there are so few good materials to learn from in self-stud

Obviously I've not looked at all of them but my main problem (especially with language books) is that there are so few good materials to learn from in self-study. Everything is "supporting the class room", or has some ridiculous split into (bad) contents and (worse) exercises that more often than not are the classic "draw three circles.. draw the rest of the owl". And yes, people usually go on to recommend some vague resource that helped them understand just enough if they were starting from a decent problem already. (IMHO a good example here is vector math. If you do some stuff with 3d and games the problems are clear and most people will start from there and then learn enough to understand it. But just learning it in isolation is where people complain).