I’m drawn to writing with a clear purpose and logical structure: writing that places the readers’ consumption of the content above all else. When studying a technical subject, I attempt to find the clearest, most concise text(s) available. That is, I look for the book or books that will expose the roots of the area. Further, I find reading more fruitful when the text is designed to lay a foundation for a field using a line of reasoning with a concise argument or set of arguments, as opposed to a purely axiomatic or pedagogical approach.

Typically, such books are shorter than those I use for reference and much longer than a wikipedia article - they are in between. I’ve taken to calling these books “tweeners” (n., pl., pronounced tee-wieners), as in “they are be-tween-ers”. Another possible term was “t’ain’ts” (n., pl., a contracted contraction of it with ain’t), as in “t’ain’t a wikipedia article and t’ain’t a reference book”. While I prefer the equally appropriate term t’ain’t, the unfortunate (inappropriate) slang meaning justifies avoiding this collision of terminology (no link). There are also less severe collisions with “tweener”:

Let it be understood that I am not referring to a tweener, n., (1) a person capable of playing multiple positions in a sport, (2) a person that falls between two age generations, (3) a bowling form, (4) a hobbit between the ages of 20 and 32 or (5) a man that looks like a woman or vice versa.

Currently, I’m reading A.I. Khinchin’s “Mathematical Foundations of Statistical Mechanics”. It’s definitely a tweener! As far as I know, the readers (and writers) of vdov.net are a diverse group. Do you have a tweener? Are you man, woman, man that looks like a woman, woman that looks like a man or hobbit enough to share it?