jack

jack

Taking notes mechanically really helps. There are scientific researches showing that the act of writing by hand have a complete different stimulus on the brain than typing.
Of course, there are people that can study and learn just fine by taking notes on a computer, you can try to understand what works best for you, but I would suggest taking notes by hand as you’ll take advantage of the various stimulus it generates.

Not all books worth a reading.
Also not all books were written to be read from cover to cover, you don’t need to read books sequentially and some subjects can be worse to understand if you read this way.

There is also difference about reading and studying.
Reading can be totally passive or a little bit active if you’re highlighting and taking some notes.
But studying is 100% active. Studying means reading the same page multiple times, taking notes using your own words, and working through all the exercises.

Again, not all books worth being studied, some of them are there to be read and that’s all.
A book like the mentioned Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective are the kind of books that have to be studied for you to take out the most of it. Each exercise are there for a reason, and when you just skip exercises you’re literally skipping learning.
Some books are even worse, such as SICP, because some teachings and explanations are included in the exercise description, if you skipped the exercise you’ll have just skipped a detailed explanation about something important.

I was a Chemistry teacher for some years, and I could see things like this all the time. Most students don’t read books at all, and when they do they just skip the exercises.
If it’s a good book, exercises are there for a reason as I’ve said, if they weren’t needed, they would not be there, trust me.

Some exercises are designed to be solved in 5 or 10 minutes. But some exercises are designed to be solved in hours, days or weeks. Most people will try to solve something for some minutes (or seconds) and they will give up either skipping the exercise or by looking for the answer. Even though hours, days or weeks sounds a lot to spend on a single exercise, there is something about creating new neural connections by thinking of something for a really long time that you’ll never know or never understand until you actually try it.
If you think about it, some physicists and mathematicians take years or decades working on a single problem or theorem, but the student don’t want to work 30 minutes on a single problem.
Working hard on hard problems are the only way for you to actually develop the ability to solve problems by yourself, I mean to create new solutions.

You’ll only need to study this hard on very deep topics, like the mentioned book for Computer Architecture, or a book on Algorithms, Math, Chemistry, etc. Not all topics require this much dedication as you can be a very good software engineer without being a specialist on everything.

So, not all books worth being studied, specially this way, some of them requires a brief reading and some books are meant to be used as a reference, meaning that you only need to know which book contains which information, so you know where to look for when you need that information.

There are also useful techniques about reading and studying, out of my head* I can remember about two good books that “teaches” how to study a book, they are How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and The Intellectual Life by Ag Sertillanges.
The Intellectual Life is a very catholic book, as Sertillanges was a priest, but you can easily “handwave” the religion and benefit from the specific knowledge.
There is also the book and course from Barbara Oakley “Learning How to Learn” that can help.

The fact is that nowadays schools don’t teaches how to read, how to study or even how to think. In most places you’re literally ordered to copy something down from the chalkboard.
A book like “How to Read a Book” sounds like a joke until you actually read it and discover that you didn’t knew how to read.

I think that the secret is knowing how to use your time effectively. I’m not saying that you need to be productive all the time, GTD or something. I don’t do that myself. But you need to choose which books you’ll just read, and each books you’ll study, and specially which books you’ll completely ignore.
A good way to know if you have to ignore a book is skimming through it and knowing how to analise a book structure, table of contents and index. Those are things that a book like “How to Read a Book” will teach you.
Looking at the exercises can also be a good indicator, if the book have exercises or projects that sounds something that you would like to learn, that’s an indicator that you might benefit from the book.

Finally summing up things are a good exercise. You already did that before when you were taking notes using your own words. Now you might want to summarise it further or maybe:

  • Pick a 3x5 cards to write summaries about key points, or write cheat sheets
  • Write blog posts about it
  • Teach someone about what you just have studied

Teaching or talking about something requires a good level of understanding about the topic, or else you’ll not be able to put it in your own words, that’s why taking notes using your own words instead of just copying it down from one source to another is a useful technique for study.

If the book have diagrams or drawings like a Systems Design book, try to write the same diagram without looking or without looking too much, it’s the equivalent of writing using your own words.
This is close to another technique called active recall, normally used by engineering and medical students.

Sorry if some of those tips are too much specific for harder or complex subjects. “Programming book” is quite generic and it can range for an Algorithms book full of mathematical definitions, to a simple book presenting a programming language syntax. One requires you to study, the other one is just a reading and reference.

Edit: * for “out of my head” I mean thinking briefly about it, I forgot the correct English term used for it.

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Post #11
Skysoft13

Skysoft13

I am checking whole book like quick reading about 1 or 2 hours, and try to create a simple project and apply the simple properties from the book. For me the best way create the project is the best to become talented developer.

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Post #12
Rik

Rik

After many years suffering of the same disease I decided that learning a programming language is not a matter of weeks but of many months.

So I don’t care anymore longer to rush to page 250 and then be proud to rush only 250 more.

At this very moment I am reading Elixir in Action and the same time I am exercising the Elixir track on exercist.org .After three months I am now on page 150 but now I do know some Elixir idiom.

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Post #14
Allyedge

Allyedge

I personally like to use books as quick guides to get a general understanding of the topic, I guess you can call it skimming.

Then if the topic is hard I either read the book to learn it, or just use Google and try learning on my own. :slight_smile:

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Post #15
AntonRich

AntonRich

As there are different kinds of books, it’s important to make the distinction first. This is how I read technical books and even here I must make a distinction. There are books that require for me to practice, to type it out.

I read fiction books on my phone mostly and take notes and bookmarks. I read technical books on my laptop.

I started tracking what I read and when. For that I’m using Zim Wiki.

Zim has a todo functionally which is really useful. Let me show you a screenshot of how it looks:

image
image834×509 56.6 KB

Zim has an index- a tree structures for notes. Here I organize all the books I’m reading.
In the note itself I create a todo for each chapter, when I finish it I write the finish date.
I copy interesting chunks from books, sometimes I add my own observations, I also add tags.
One of the tags I add is ‘Bug’, where I write down the problem I encounter, and later I add a solution.

All that is useful because I can later use search to quickly find how I solved a bug or some interesting piece of information.

As I want to learn Emacs, in the far future I’m planning on using Org mode instead of Zim.

There are other things I do when I read. Mainly:

  1. The jump ahead technique.
    I try to guess where the author is going and try to get there first and then compare my solutions.
    It also gives some boost to my brain to be more active and pay more attention.
  2. Free recall
    I try (not always) after finishing a chapter or even a page to sit down with a blank piece of paper and write all I could remember from it.
  3. Tweaking
    When I work out the code I usually ask myself what if questions.
  4. I sometimes come up with questions/quizes which I add to Anki.
    I feel like this could be a really serious learning technique if the questions are well-thought out and provoke thinking rather than just remembering the answer. In reality it’s a mix of both.
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Post #16
dewetblomerus

dewetblomerus

I try to just read the book like a novel unless I see something that I would really like to try immediately on the computer.

My goal with reading the book is not to be able to write code without having to look up the documentation, it is to have the correct language for looking up the documentation.

Speaking the same language as the documentation and blog-post authors is HUGE. This is also the main benefit I get from listening to Podcasts.

If you google “pick correct function based on inputs” you will have a lot less success than if you google “match function head arguments”. Even if you found the correct thing while using the wrong vocabulary, your mind will be taken off the problem you are trying to solve because you will need to translate between what you thought the thing was called to what the documentation actually calls it.

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Post #17
jbz3n

jbz3n

Stopped using paperbacks and hardcovers long time ago, too expensive to import.

Tried the Kindle and other android tablets too, the problem of focus is real with any internet connected devices.

A good size should be between 10-13 inches, those are the most expensive ones but they allow you to read and annotate PDFs with “moderate” ease.

rEmarkable and Kobo have E Ink devices on those categories.

They’re limited when it comes to hardware and features, that’s a plus if you just wanna read and annotate tho.

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Post #18
rtb

rtb

I like to type all code examples in my editor and eval in an iex session via vim-slime. I’m currently working through Programming Elixir and really enjoying the code exercises

I’ve also started buying paper books again because it keeps me focused on one book at a time

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Post #19
soyjeansoy

soyjeansoy

this, especially when moving too often from one place to another

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