I used it as a teaching aid to help colleagues from our application teams get the background and skills to work on our core platform. I certainly got a lot out of it because I had to do all the exercises, and I think if i hadn’t had to prepare like that I would have skimmed more and gained less. But I already had a background that covered a lot of the same areas.

So it is going to depend a lot on your background and the effort you put in. It may be better done as part of a reading group where you can discuss the exercises than on your own as some are meant to highlight why certain approaches are hard and are not commonly used.