For sure, skip ahead :) Math textbooks are not generally meant to be read front-to-back (and math papers even less so). This one lends itself well to a straight

For sure, skip ahead :) Math textbooks are not generally meant to be read front-to-back (and math papers even less so). This one lends itself well to a straight-line readthrough, but what's important is what you get out of it. As the sibling comment notes, if you skip too far ahead, the technical material will make you very well aware of that fact. But I think chapter 8 is a good place to jump in -- the material up to that point is mostly setting up intuitions and analogies. I think those are important to pick up, but they're also the kind of thing you pick up from sufficient exposure to mathematics of any flavor, so there's no harm. Chapters 9 through 13 show how lots of other things can be seen as categories, so if you're already aware of some of them from undergrad math, you're probably good to go.