Reading Books
Lately I’ve been managing to read a lot of books. In order to achieve more in less time I’ve tried speed reading, however that doesn’t really work well with technical texts where mostly you need to stop and think about connecting things you’ve learnt.
However its been a long time that I’m using what I would call no-bullshit-reading. In this so called method, I’m impatiently skipping the filler material in pages and visually scan the page for the actually knowledge bits. I never read a whole paragraph – start right in the middle, and if you need - work back or forward. You’d be amazed how much bullshit there is in even the highly respected technical works. I don’t think it is done intentionally. Think about it, when you discover something great, you _have_ to pad it with your own stuff.
Now look at the bolds. This is what I would read in this entire blog post :).
To sum up:
* never start reading at the beginning, never finish at the end.
* always look for the point, skip filler material – there is no need to read about the author’s friend that used X and Y and that’s why I’m showing you Z. just skip to the showing you Z part.
* the key is learning to identify those parts.
I was able to read 3 books in the span of 4 days, total pages well over 1000.
I’ll publish reviews once my opinion solidifies :)