Can&#x27;t agree more. Definition-theorem-proof type of textbooks is way too clean. They don&#x27;t tell you how ideas came to be or why they mattered. In other words, it&#x27;s hard for students to learn the intuitions behind the ideas. I wish there are list of &quot;XXX from Ground-Up&quot; type of books that show readers a list of problems, struggles of people trying to solve them, and how ideas emerge from the numerous attempts. Leslie&#x27;s paper Paxos Made Simple was written in that way. A few chapters of Kleinberg&#x27;s Algorithm Design were written in that way too.