Are there any well-regarded textbooks you have tried before turning to the Internet? If, say, SICP or The Art of Computer Programming comes off as "mindlessly ram[ming] raw information things through", you may want to promote "people work differently" back to prominence as a hypothesis.

I will say, though, that in my experience reading a textbook is very different from reading on the Internet - rather like switching abruptly to rifle shooting from cross-country skiing, metaphorically speaking.