One thing I learned from 30 years doing university-level teaching is that if you throw a grab bag at people, most of them won't learn much of anything. That's why university courses (and good textbooks) tend to impose a bit of structure on what's to be learned. My advice: pick one or two books from the plethora mentioned in this thread, and work your way through them. Once you have built a mental model of the particular topic areas you want to understand, then you can start widening your search.

As for lookup tables, I won't say anything bad about them in general. That said, if you pressed the Memory Clear button on a 1620 console, it would wipe the addition and multiplication tables, meaning you couldn't even load a program until you had manually entered replacement values. This was a Dumb Idea :).