How do you read programming books?

I have it very similar. I feel like whenever I need to understand a topic better, I rush and buy a book about it. Or whenever PragProg releases something Elixir related or interesting in some other way, I do the same.
Then after reading few chapters, I just skim the rest of the book to get some kind of overview to know where to look if I need more information.

I think that once someone has a lot of experience and just need to know the language/tool/… specifics, traditional style of book can be too verbose. But I buy them anyway. It’s some kind of addiction, I guess.

That’s why I really liked the Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves: Visualize Your Sensor Data with Phoenix and Grafana by Alexander Koutmos, Bruce A. Tate, Frank Hunleth book. It was short and dense enough to keep me entertained and finish it without forcing myself into it.

Yes those short books, kind of like extended tutorials, are tractable with a detailed-reading approach.

I remember trying a more ‘novel-reading’ approach with Steve Klabnik’s Rust book. I found it well-written and easy to read. But when I closed it after some 500-odd pages, I had no more idea how to write Rust than I had on page 1. I think that experience amplified my tendency to get bogged down with ‘working through’, rather than just reading.

I usually read digital copies of programming books, so that I can quickly switch between a page of the book and my text editor. The exercises and projects contained in a book are the most important parts, and that’s where the bulk of my learning takes place. Often I don’t find the exposition of some piece of code very helpful, rather running it myself and making small changes is how I come to understand it.

I don’t remember if it’s the textbook Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, or from a lecture in the corresponding CMU course, but the recommendation was to read each chapter of the book three times. John Carmack has similar advice about going through books “at least twice”, https://d3dvortex.blogspot.com/2005/07/programming-advice-from-john-carmack-i.html

Reading a book by itself never improved my programming ability, working through the problems in a book or writing a project inspired by a book has.

Split view pdf / terminal+tmux+neovim I try and follow along in the terminal with the book. I’m currently reading “Haskell Programming from first principles” in my .hs files I use comments to take notes as I go along with the author it’s kind of like a jupyter notebook and has worked really well for me. My notes for Haskell are organized as - 0. Operators, 1. Data Types, 2. Expressions, 3. Functions, 4. Recursion, 5. (Purely Functional) Data Structures, 6. (Haskell) Algorithms… This helps me focus on specific objectives “learning x by x”.

this is a good tip tbh

A good programming book encourages you to open your programming IDE and actually type the code, to experiment, think or thicker. Reading books also allows you to understand and develop a common language with your collogues.

I try to be methodical when reading - by taking notes or highlighting things and then going over those items later. I also try to make sure I understand everything before moving to the next chapter - this doesn’t mean I have to remember it all, just understand what’s going on before moving on. I will happily read a chapter more than once if it feels like something hasn’t made sense.

I will also only read books that appear to be on my wavelength - there’s no point trying to read a book if you just don’t click with it. This is also one of the reasons I prefer professionally published books, they’re usually of a decent quality and an editor has usually made sure the information is accessible and easy to understand. Reading a book is a big investment of time, hence I prefer the highest quality if at all possible.

I have more tips here: My best tips on learning/reading/studying!

Something I have found though (and I wonder if any of you have too) is that I find it harder to get into the mindset to read, and I think this is because of how our brains are changing thanks to social media/dopamine hits. I read recently that young people can only concentrate for short bursts now, I find that worrying.

There is a way around it but it takes some discipline. From my post above:

With this technique and enough discipline (i.e continuously over a few days) you can get back into studying/reading… just like we did in the old days

(If anyone tries it, let me know what you think!)

I used to have a piles of unfinished programming books until I changed my reading style.

What I used to do is, get ebooks and have the book open on one monitor and a repl/ide on the other. However, that often led me google for related things and move away from the flow.

Nowadays I buy paperbacks and when reading i go to a different table armed only with paper and pencil, and it works for me. I have finished more programming books in recent times than ever before.

This is great advice! Also why I love my Kindle and really appreciate books written with e-readers in mind, such as the Ecto book (here’s my review of it: Programming Ecto (Pragprog) - #40 by AstonJ).

Oh no, your review might have induced me to pick up another book! Sounds pretty enticing.

I find the various responses here interesting. Perhaps not surprising for an engineer-oriented readership, most are ‘tactical’ (that’s not quite the right description, but I need more coffee to come up with something better). I personally don’t have tactical issues ie. paper book vs ereader (both, depending) or how to stay undistracted (I tackled that years ago when first afflicted with rss-feeds semi-addiction), or social media (long-time refusenik) . It’s more a kind of philosophical issue. With all other book categories I have 2 modes (or more precisely a continuum with 2 poles): breadth vs depth. Some books I’ll read in armchair ‘breadth’ mode for general insight and background. Some I’ll ‘study’. Or I’ll approach the same book both ways.

I find both important, but for some reason I’m propelled almost involuntarily into depth/study mode with programming books.The time-consuming nature of that limits my range of familiarity more than I’d like (hence the unfinished pile ..). I’d like to try and at least read some of my slush pile this year without getting entirely captured by the quicksand of study mode.