Comment by tim-kt

I'm a mathematics graduate student. A good textbook about a topic in math is gold. Sometimes I even prefer reading a book than going to a lecture because I can skip things that I know or take more time on difficult sections. One time, in a theoretical physics course, I just didn't like the lecturer's style. Fortunately, his lectures were based on a very good book (Kuypers, classical mechanics) which I then read. But I don't think that I have ever "finished" a textbook from front to back. There are always things that are more important.