I've always found reference books a lot easier to get my head around than instructional textbooks. One of my favorite finds as a kid was a book about the Apple

I've always found reference books a lot easier to get my head around than instructional textbooks. One of my favorite finds as a kid was a book about the Apple II that covered topics like the memory map and hardware registers, and my least favorite format was the 300-page book where you start with writing "Hello World" and twenty chapters in you're following instructions on how to schedule asynchronous messages or something. I don't think I've ever gotten past chapter three in a book like that, and I've had a reasonably successful, decades-long career in development.