For a business I had to learn how to design parts for mass production injection molded plastic. It’s simple in concept but the devil is in the details, of which there are a great many.

I couldn’t find a general non-fiction book with the information I needed, so I found and ordered the best textbook I could find on the subject.

Teaching yourself from textbooks, I think you just have to be prepared for a serious grind, involving lot’s of looking up math and other terms that you either forgot or never knew, trips down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, etc.

Those books are, for the most part, designed as teaching tools to accompany classroom learning — sometimes the whole class is going to come and not have a clue what they’ve read, and it’ll be via class or office hours they figure out WTF is going on. These books are not designed for autodidacts.

I could be less charitable and talk about a lack of competitive pressure and perverse incentives for selection of academic books, but I’ll leave it at that.

Worked out for me and the manufacturer I was working with said we were the most professional part designers he’d worked with (we were helped tremendously by software I’d written), he wasn’t a bullshitter generally, so I’m inclined to believe it.

You can be successful but it’s going to take a lot more energy than it would with a nice trade book with an animal on the cover.