Textbooks are great for quickly acquiring tree-level knowledge (i.e. the basics or the canon of the field).
There's one downside however -- college textbooks are incentivized to be comprehensive and hence they will often cover chapters on topics that don't matter or ought to be given less weight in the larger scheme of things. If you are uninitiated in a particular subject, you will be hard pressed to discern what's important and what's not. Many textbooks also tend to cover textbook theory which are useful for understanding the subject matter but not useful in the real world (e.g. the determinant method for solving linear systems of equations is almost never used in the real world)
Textbook authors are also incentivized to add chapters every couple of years so that new editions can be published. Sometimes those new chapters are important, sometimes they are not.
Textbooks are a starting point but they generally should not be read end-to-end. A better way to read them is the guidance of an instructor or a (online?) community of practitioners that can tell you what to pay attention to and what chapters to skip.
My (rather strongly held) view is that most things in textbooks tend to be much more useful than people think, and I actually rather love reading textbooks cover to cover, in the order it's presented, preface and all.
There's one downside however -- college textbooks are incentivized to be comprehensive and hence they will often cover chapters on topics that don't matter or ought to be given less weight in the larger scheme of things. If you are uninitiated in a particular subject, you will be hard pressed to discern what's important and what's not. Many textbooks also tend to cover textbook theory which are useful for understanding the subject matter but not useful in the real world (e.g. the determinant method for solving linear systems of equations is almost never used in the real world)
Textbook authors are also incentivized to add chapters every couple of years so that new editions can be published. Sometimes those new chapters are important, sometimes they are not.
Textbooks are a starting point but they generally should not be read end-to-end. A better way to read them is the guidance of an instructor or a (online?) community of practitioners that can tell you what to pay attention to and what chapters to skip.