Completely agree.

I've taken the liberty of taking a quick snap of a random page in "Arithmetic for the Practical Man" to include below for those poor people poisoned by modern textbooks:

http://i.imgur.com/Bg9OiiK.jpg (926KiB)

I see horrible modern behemoths of over a 1000 pages that leave you dazed, confused and full of facts but nowhere to go with them. EE textbooks are even worse on this front than your average mathematics text book. I've seen one proudly promoting over 1500 pages and 1000 illustrations, but doesn't even get as far as an opamp or discuss anything at system level.