I wanted to ask the following on Mathematics stack exchange, but checking the help centre, it appears that this site is more relevant: "Mathematical education, especially about teaching and pedagogy: Mathematics Educators"
Throughout my undergraduate degree, it felt that for any course that I would need to study, I could find a textbook that covered all of the content needed and more - with this in mind, I would simply linearly work through the textbooks, and whenever I didn't understand something from one, I would move to another.
Now that I am in graduate school, this model of education does not seem to work. It seems that any textbook I find on more advanced topics only barely will touch on the thing I am interested, and will otherwise be largely off topic. Is a student meant to transition into a new state of study, where 1) I simply read a few paragraphs from this textbook, and a few from another, and so on?
2)Is it better that I give up on textbooks and simply look through the literature for the original papers? It seems that doing so would decrease the breadth of my study, but perhaps this is necessary.