Peter Norvig has this unique style where he explains his design process in detail, including exploring the problem on example cases, writing multiple solutions, the thinking involved in moving from one solution to the next one, including profiling and finding bottlenecks etc., you see how he goes about problem solving and he is a master problem solver. In fact his writing provides a good opportunity to reflect on what designing programs even means: investigating and choosing trade-offs, choosing an adequate representation (data structure) for a problem etc. This illustrates on a small scale how a lot of the most serious software engineering happens, the engineering where you actually have a definite, hard problem to solve, rather than just making the program pretty by criteria on which there is no agreement etc.
He does this not only in those notebooks but for example also in his "Paradigms Of Artificial Intelligence Programming" book. I have not seen this done to any serious extent in any algorithm textbook or tutorials.