Probably additional skills and experience you picked up all these years by solving/understanding hard problems
It is very difficult to take that step back and divorce myself from years of experience and tough lessons, and to present the subject matter in a way that can be grasped without an innate understanding that took me years to reach.
Ah, but there are books, just making you want to go tp sleep by just looking at them and some are able to spark passion (in me).
My point being, it is definitely about motivation and discipline, but a good didactic book, helps with that.
And since we are all different (types of lerners), there definitely isn't one book to rule them all. And its been a while since I studied from a book, but I could usually tell from skimmimg over a few pages, of whether this book can help me, or not.
So it gets you over a hump which might make the more advanced / detailed books more accessible.
It is free online. It starts with recursion and dynamic programming. I felt like dynamic programming really clicked for me after reading the first few chapters but this was probably the 3rd or 4th book I read on the subject.
Although I also dont want to discourage anyone from trying this either. Anything that'll get people to learn is better than apathy. :)
I've experienced the '3rd text' phenomenon, but I could also point to specific features affecting the wide variance in math text effectiveness.
And this book is a pretty good example of exactly that: it has specific unique features allowing it to fulfill its promise of being an effective 'translation' guide for a programmers to a bunch of otherwise typically implicit ideas relating to methods or foundational concepts in mathematics that can be extremely difficult stumbling blocks for the self-taught.
IMO a good strategy: take people's glowing praise about particular texts with a grain of salt—but, if specific beneficial features can be pointed out, which would be advantageous to you as a learner, know that can mean striking gold sometimes (in terms of not wasting time).
I'm learning Rust now and feel like I need to do the same thing. Read "the rust book" plus Rust by Example plus one or two Rust books on the O'Reilly website. It takes a lot longer to read multiple books in parallel but I find I remember better this way.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/1...
Walter Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis (chapters 1 through 7). A mental torture on the first exposure, but like a fine wine when the palate is mature.
I heard a conjecture once that the best textbook you'll find on any given topic is your third. The point, of course, is that it simply takes about three serious attempts to make it click - but it is a fallacy to give all the credit to the third book.