Cohesion is a problem with xeroxed articles. Not to say it isn't with most textbooks, but it can be one of their primary goals, whereas the primary goal of an article is to disseminate a set of ideas in as efficient a way as possible, with some assumptions about prior knowledge of the reader.

I remember sweating through problem after problem in calculus so I could do problem after problem on the tests.

So did I. Part of internalizing the fundamentals of a subject is working through exercises that depend on those fundamentals. You don't get that when something else is doing the work for you. Learning isn't easy, and we need to get over the desire to want to make it so.