A lot of the material overlaps significantly with others I've read, so AFAICT "working through" the book, at least for me, amounts to a few hours reading some background definitions plus the last chapter. Maybe it does seem hard to get to that position, but really it's just building up skills incrementally. Google all the terms you don't understand, read the explanatory posts until you get to something you don't understand, and repeat recursively until it's clear or you get bored... so far depth-first seems to work better than breadth-first, there aren't that many foundational concepts.