Much of the recent coverage of Janet Yellen, President Obama’s choice to head the Federal Reserve, has focused on her personal style, portraying her as a consensus builder and referring to her quiet demeanor — offering a contrast with the sometimes abrasive image of the previous front-runner for the job, Lawrence H. Summers. But wider reading offers a more detailed picture of Ms. Yellen as an obsessive student of economics who chooses her battles carefully.

A rare personal look at Ms. Yellen comes from The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper at her alma mater. It describes a brilliant – if slightly overachieving — economics scholar with recollections from one of her teaching assistants, Jeff Koshel:

“The argument (for one of her papers) is that if you had a currency area that would allow some country or geographic region to change its exchange rates, it could increase trade,” Koshel said. “At the time, I couldn’t quite get my head around it, but she wrote a very thoughtful, really theoretical paper, and 35 years later, everyone is talking about how if Greece had the ability to change its exchange rates, it could probably get out of its economic slump more easily than being tied to the euro.”

Mr. Koshel also recalled that Ms. Yellen answered exam questions that were not even asked, and that devotion to the field continues today. A USA Today profile featuring interviews with her friends, mainly other economists, notes family vacations to the beach that include “a suitcase of economics books.”

But it was a real-world observation that shook up her views about regulation, Binyamin Appelbaum of The Times reported. Testifying before a commission investigating the financial crisis in 2010, Ms. Yellen acknowledged that the San Francisco Fed, which oversaw the mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, did not do enough to rein it in. The experience “has strongly inclined me toward tougher standards and built-in rules that will kick into effect automatically,” she told the commission.

Her leadership of the San Francisco Fed could be an issue in her confirmation, predicts Ronald D. Orol in The Deal Pipeline, who looks at Ms. Yellen’s past statements and proposals to determine that she probably would not move to break up the big banks – but would continue efforts to eliminate the perception that the big banks are “too big to fail.”

While Ms. Yellen’s supporters have promoted her as the conciliatory antithesis to the blunt Mr. Summers, Jim Puzzanghera and Don Lee note in The Los Angeles Times that she has had successful confrontations, even with giants like Alan Greenspan when he was Fed chairman. She had been on the Fed board for only a few months when, concerned about the effect on consumers, she persuaded her colleagues to vote against the chairman’s wishes to change a regulation on bank deposit interest rates. It was one of only two times Mr. Greenspan lost a vote during his 18-year tenure.

This guide features highlights published since Aug. 1. For more, consult Mr. Appelbaum’s earlier reading list.