Unpopular opinion: decent pop science books are often better to learn from than textbooks because textbooks rarely give any context, reason for why you are doing what you are doing, what possible use it might be, or where you might see it again.

They are different things, of course, and aren’t directly comparable in some ways. Textbooks are written to give concrete examples of techniques and approaches. This is valuable and necessary. However, even many “basic” textbooks assume you are already nearly an expert in a particular field. Specific techniques and formalism are important but if the learner doesn’t understand why they are doing something or what it means, they will not integrate it now and definitely won’t recall it later.

The reason I say pop science books are better to learn from is that if you don’t understand the context, the history, and the meaning, you are forever lost, while (as long as you have a decent basic understanding) specific tools can be taken off the shelf and used as needed.