BibTeX: Refer to page numbers or sections

Question

I am using BibTeX for the first time and I wonder what is the correct way of referring to page numbers etc. inside a referenced book/article/website/…

Let's start with this block of code:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
  For a recap on irrational numbers, see \cite{hardywright2008}.
\bibliography{ref}
  \bibliographystyle{alpha}
\end{document}

I saved it in the file mwe.tex. Also, I have the file ref.bib in the same directory:

@book{hardywright2008,
  author = {G. H. Hardy, E. M. Wright},
  title = {An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  year = {2008},
  edition = {6}
}

When I compile using

pdflatex mwe.tex
bibtex mwe.aux
pdflatex mwe.tex
pdflatex mwe.tex

then the result looks like this:

This is all good up to this point. But I don't want the reader to search their way through 600 pages of number theory when all they have to read is chapter 4 which starts on page 45. So I wanted to make use of the optional argument of \cite.
The file mwe2.tex contains the following code:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
  For a recap on irrational numbers, see \cite[45]{hardywright2008}.
\bibliography{ref}
  \bibliographystyle{alpha}
\end{document}

The file ref.bib remained unchanged. Compiling with

pdflatex mwe2.tex
bibtex mwe2.aux
pdflatex mwe2.tex
pdflatex mwe2.tex

produces this:

The problem is that no one will know what this number 45 means. So the reference should somehow contain the information "page 45 ff."
One way could be to omit the page-number-reference in the \cite-command and include it in the text that I write, like

For a recap on irrational numbers, see pages 45 ff. in \cite{hardywright2008}.

Better (in my opinion, but you may convince me that my opinion is wrong) would be to include the page-number-reference in the \cite-command. I could do

For a recap on irrational numbers, see \cite[pp. 45 ff.]{hardywright2008}.

Yet I don't know if the produced output is easily readable.

Is there a standard way to include references to page numbers or sections or the like in the \cite-command?