@july
Actually, I take this back. I generally feel the same way about books of any magnitude. At least for me, this is a personal thing, and your result may vary. For myself, I find that it's okay to understand at a very high level first and then dive into the details as needed. I think some people are the opposite, where you require low-level building blocks of concepts with the assumption or the payoff being at a later time.
School never did this really well, btw and I often have had to do this on my own - to understand the bigger picture significantly much earlier than the stage. I wanted to often know why something was the case before something was the case. I wasn't convinced if someone just told me that something was the case.