Said this before and I strongly recommend this. Go to the library and read all the table of contents and intros to all the books in the topic and also the ones nearby on the shelves (they will be related). You will get a lot quickly even though you’ll only follow a bit fully.
This is actually good advice: you learn a lot from skimming the tables of contents of textbooks, understanding roughly what subtopics a topic consists of. If you then skim chapters here and there, you can get a rough sense of the big picture pretty quickly
No. And do not use ChatGPT right away. This is *terrible* advice in my opinion, it will make it seem too easy and take away all your learning if you do it like this. You have to struggle with it. That is the only way you learn.
Suppose you are in a math class and you are struggling to follow the lecture. The right strategy is often to give up, go home, and just read the textbook (with ChatGPT) yourself