As someone whose dug these holes before - there are tutorials even for advanced stuff, usually when a hacker figures out some paper he shares it with others in a less academicky way and then it's much easier to pick up. I still remember casey muratori gjk video in highschool, i found some paper using math notation for sums and throwing abstract terms arround and then I saw this guys video and it clicked and I had a collision detection demo running in two days.

Academic approach is nececary for research work but when you're just implementing stuff it's already been groked by other people and you can find their blog/notes/code online.