Sorry if it came off a bit harsh. I think the emphasis I would put on all this is variety. All of these books are like different shapes and sizes of tools that

Sorry if it came off a bit harsh. I think the emphasis I would put on all this is variety. All of these books are like different shapes and sizes of tools that you're using to pry open an understanding of the subject. At certain moments you'll want one sort of tool, and at different moments you'll want another. Maybe, on a particular topic, you want to read a chatty, informal explanation, and then you'll want something heavily summarized to nail things in place. Then you might want something really rigorous if you need to go into a lot of detail. Or it might be useful to have a text that scatters explanation of the concepts in amongst the steps to solve practical examples. All of these approaches have value. When I was learning Maths and Physics one of the major conclusions was that there was not enough variety in the material which was available, so when you hit a brick wall, part of the skill was developing an acceptance that you would hit your head against the wall repeatedly until something sank in. Which is inherently frustrating. FWIW I think it's also inevitable that a higher level summary has some kind of slightly leaky abstractions in order to give people a feel for what's going on. I don't see why Maths is any different from Chemistry, or other sciences, in the sense that you need to teach it progressively, at least to some degree. You talk first to a Chemistry student about covalent and ionic bonds, you don't start immediately on Quantum Mechanics and Orbital Theory.