[gambler]

I haven't looked too deeply at this particular book yet, but your overall sentiment is sounds very familiar.

Too many people are willing to accept (and defend!) sub-par explanations and overcome them through titanic mental grind. The scary part of it is that often this leaves you with a broken mental model that continues to require tons of effort in application. Meanwhile, much better explanations exist. They make learning easy and fun, while also giving you intuition that is easy to apply and even expand to other areas.

I am pretty good at spotting bad mental models, but it's really hard to prove that they are bad, until you find one clearly superior. Recently I stumbled upon MIT's linear algebra class at Open Courseware and was blown away by how much easier it was to follow than the stuff I had in college, while covering the same material in much greater detail.