I suppose it depends on your approach - my two cents - is your book . . . a. geared toward programming / learning a language? I've been surprised, given the sp

I suppose it depends on your approach - my two cents - is your book . . . a. geared toward programming / learning a language? I've been surprised, given the sparsity, the efficacy of a "showing-by-example" style of writing seen in the Apache Thrift documentation. K&R (to me) is decent for language acquisition, but even more useful as a quick "how did they do that again" refresher. I've found "Linux Kernel Development" (Love) as a very nice book blending concepts with programmatic examples. So the above is maybe a spectrum within this style of writing that I've found helpful. b. a more "textbook" / algorithmic approach? I remember thinking "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach" (Kurose, Ross) was one of the lighter texts that didn't necessarily feel "textbook." "Introduction to Information Retrieval" (Manning, Raghavan, Schutze) also comes to mind, but more academic.