I agree here. I tried to power through the book (which to be fair is really clear, didactic and still concise) and I was stumped because I'm more practical minded, and I'd be trying to look for examples in my domain (signal processing: filtering, beamforming, mle/map, compression, etc.) and I'd be stumped quite fast.

I appreciate any textbook with interesting real world examples and slow worked-through solutions. But maybe I'm a bit too lazy to do the work myself.

I still haven't grasped really what svd does, why it is different from eigenstuff (and... well... what eigenvalues/vectors are...) and the link between those and solving linear systems, and with the characteristic polynomial, and matrix inversion, and... I have intuitions, and I can mostly implement the stuff, but no clear understanding.

So... I suck at learning linear algebra :-)