Okay, I think I get it. In Chemistry textbooks, when an author is going to explain something to me, he will first tell me the results, tell me (in just enough detail to get me confused) what the essence of the thing he is going to cover is, and then dive into a chapter that covers the material for real.
I guess I understand the value of this approach. This way, I know why I should care about the method before I get into it. THe problem is that these introductions have just enough confusing terminology that when I read them before having read the actual chapter I get horribly nervous and feel like I don't understand anything at all.
But even in the course of the chapter, there is still this issue that the results are presented before their justification.
Take, for example, Configuration Interaction. It is, to my current (2-days' worth of exposure) understanding, a method of approximating the ground state wavefunction of an n-electron molecule by taking linear combinations of known n-electron wavefuctions and varying the linear combination coefficients such that the energy is minimized (i.e. use the variational principle).
Szabo and Ostlund covers this well. I'm not just saying this because Szabo's first name is Attilla, my TA recommended this book. But I guess the sad truth is that I actually have to read the whole 40 page chapter. I don't have that kind of attention span.
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