[sno129]

As a professional mathematician, I strongly disagree with the claim that "higher math" abandons worked examples. Any course or book that does not devote a significant amount of time to examples is a bad course or book.

Even Grothendieck, who was famously known for thinking very abstractly and avoiding examples, was motivated by concrete questions (e.g., the Weil conjectures) coming from concrete examples. To me, and most other mathematicians, the whole point of mathematics is to do examples, and theory building or any other abstract nonsense should be motivated by the desire to better understand or unify examples.