> I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry, which sounds a lot like, here is how to use pip!

Yeah I agree. I hate when books do more hand holding than the reader clearly needs to the point of tedium. Plus many of those setup steps like how to use a package manager change over time and make the book stale instead of evergreen. And Austin was clearly not writing an absolute beginners book.

That's why when I pitched both the Classic Computer Science Problems series and Computer Science from Scratch I explicitly told publishers in the proposals that I was not writing a beginners book (been there, done that). I was clear that I was writing an intermediate book for people that already know programming.

It's a different, more narrow audience. But you can be successful if you write a good book. It's also a less tapped market and luckily publishers were able to see that.