Stick and Rudder is great book, but you will fail in your engineering efforts if that's all you want to use. Langewiesche was trying to get people to use common sense to fly better. But engineering, physics, chemistry, nuclear science are based on largely imperceptible truths. That was one of the reasons I got out of chemistry, I was good at it until they got to the nuclear part and quantum theory, entire semesters went by where there was basically nothing to see, touch, do, or feel. It was so removed from common life it was unnerving. All abstract theory, all the time. I wasn't cut out for it perhaps, but then I found aerospace engineering as an applied science.