Once upon a time, when bricks and mortar bookshops were a thing, I would wander down to such a place and browse a shelf of books on my current subject of interest. I would read a page or two to see if the general level matched where I was at, not too simple, not too difficult. I would check some topic I was aware of to see how it was covered, and generally walk out with a selected book that matched my needs pretty well.
Now that bookshops are all online, and the books that I buy generally digital, it’s a bit harder to gauge what is suitable. Sure, most books (e.g. Kindle books from Amazon) give a preview, but this is generally the introductory material which is not very suitable for making the kind of judgement I’m interested in. Result is that I have a lot of ebooks that don’t really suit my need. Convenient, sure. Appropriate? Not so much.
Anyway, I have yet another book on Reinforcement Learning, and I’m really liking this one. In the days of bricks and mortar, this is the book I would have come away with. Some people have suggested I may be somewhere ‘on the spectrum’, not too far along to be sure, but as I’ve mentioned previously I’m pretty inflexible in what makes a good match for learning material.