Well, I suppose there's also why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby
One way to teach dry math'y concepts is to make them fun to learn. Serious Math people mind find them irritating but for the remainder crowd it is a fun exercise.
There is a big difference between two approaches. In the former you get facts as knowledge. In the latter your invent the knowledge yourself, and understand the processes, whys and hows you got there. The latter is a far better way because its hard to forget what you invented yourself.
Basically all throughout the book(s), they authors use food names as variable, function names etc. It is indeed a nice idea because people do tend to associate good memories with delicious food. Especially if the food is greasy or sweet!
That quote This space is reserved for Jelly Bean stains is basically a filler sentence at the end of a chapter on a page, which happens to be high up in the page, the remainder of the page is basically empty, so they put it in as a joke.
This is not any different than the joke at the beginning of the 'Camel Book', Laziness, Impatience and Hubris, the three great virtues of a programmer.
You really should read those books, its one of those unique kinds of books that use a very innovative(albeit a very ancient) technique to teach you some very mind bending concepts. Its is possible that the approach will help you in understanding other things as well.
For example, someone wrote a book on Kafka streams for kids. It just dumb founded me that someone created it for that audience. The audacity to suggest that kids should learn about that/have something for them. It's a bit weird and doesn't teach lessons outside of the book material.
Actually introducing some of these concepts in an abstract sense can help the kid appreciate subject at hand, and initiate them into more serious study.
Imagine telling a kid they could use a bunch of their friends and using map-reduce to count all the dogs in a park(send each to a section in the park, ask them to count the dogs[map], add all them at the end[reduce]).
Many of these concepts can get kids excited about STEM which is good!
