This is a related to my number one problem with technical writing or text books: forward references. "Let's talk all about a topic we will define three chapter

This is a related to my number one problem with technical writing or text books: forward references. "Let's talk all about a topic we will define three chapters from now" Learning about things with undefined terms, concepts and acronyms is much harder and may require multiple passes over the material. It's a hard part of writing a linear book about a topic that's probably a graph, but good writers manage it. Bad writers just leave their readers confused.