"I consider it amazing that some people do go cover to cover in my books. In most cases I know that people are going to pick and choose the parts that they like. But they know that if they dig further then they'll get something that has only one subset of jargon describing it instead of all different kinds of notations and terminology -- if I didn't write the books it would be much harder for people to find stuff out. That's what turns me on."
Like I said, it's like the Bible. Most people don't cover-to-cover the Bible. But the Bible also isn't the "encyclopedia of Catholicism". People have favorite passages. There are books in it people do read end to end. There are places, like Psalms, where you open to an arbitrary page and read either direction.
--Knuth, in Coders at Work