Also Gauss: It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment (understanding). Words in Parenthesis mine.
I am of the firm belief that the original Discoverer/Inventor of an Idea/Concept/etc. is the best person to explain it since by definition they can lead you through the process of intuitively "getting" it. This is understanding from first principles. But since many of the original writings can be difficult to understand due to Complexity/Time Period you need a "Expert" who can explain the main ideas to the Student.
So what Books can HN folks recommend that fall into this category? A few examples from my collection;
1) A Source Book in Mathematics by David Eugene Smith.
2) Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar.
3) The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper On Computability And The Turing Machine by Charles Petzold.
4) Maxwell on the Electromagnetic Field: A Guided Study (Masterworks of Discovery) by Thomas K. Simpson.
Any and All suggestions welcome.
Hamming codes are another example. Although Richard Hamming was one of the first people to apply the mathematics of finite fields to the problem of data corruption the development of the theory after him has been simplified enough that it can now be taught to college undergraduates. I wouldn't want to learn about error correcting codes from Hamming directly because its likely that his original formulation would not have been as clear as what is currently taught in undergraduates courses.
This is the case for most mathematical fields. The original inventors often miss out on useful abstractions that make the original idea much easier to learn and understand.