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Assuming that the student is a complete beginner. Do you think the best way to read a challenging technical book is to speed-read at the start - to pinpoint the

• throwawayjava 8y ago
  I don't think "speed reading" is necessary, but being able to read not-slowly and knowing how to effectively skim are both useful skills. Truly speed reading anything remotely technical -- especially mathematics -- is probably an exercise in futility (at least for me). Quickly reading from beginning to end is useful, but only if you know why you're doing that and what you should be looking for. Examples: - "this lemma gets used over and over in the proofs"; - "this theorem seems to be the main result of the text"; - "this function is where all the action is"; - "the application is organized around this framework"; etc.) The only really effective technique I know is guided practice. From a teaching perspective, you can spend a lecture on "technical reading skills" like this: 1. assign a reading and make it very clear that this reading is non-optional, that the whole point of the next lecture is to talk about technical reading skills, and explain how huge an advantage students have in life if they know how to read technical content well. 2. hold a quiz that checks for comprehension (e.g., a proof that's a trivial result of a key theorem; a program that's a trivial modification of a key algorithm; etc. Basically, something that's trivial if you did the reading and understood the "main point" but hard enough that you're not going to be able to do it otherwise). You can peer grade the quiz on the spot, or not, but at some point make sure you grade the quiz so that students who did poorly know that they need to work on reading. 3. Walk through the text on the projector, pointing out "oh look that idea from the algorithm got used here and here and here" or "and we're using that lemma again and again", etc. You do this once or a couple of times and then invite struggling students to office hours for individual practice. Reinforce this the rest of the semester. Force students to practice reading by holding (fiar and easy) quizzes on the assigned reading prior to covering the material in lecture. Respect students by going beyond the assigned reading in lecture. Help students improve by doing a good job at grading the quizzes, or by doing little exercises on the board that focus on trivial extensions of the "main idea" of the assigned reading. Good examples of CS topics this works for are the pumping lemma and dynamic programming. Simple enough that there's a relatively short reading on the topic, but complicated enough that you can really test technical reading skills.
• azeirah 8y ago
  #BEGINRAMBLE I personally feel there are multiple "levels" or "layers" to understanding a book. It's a bit loose, but I'd say technical books have "structure", "content", "detail" and "cohesion". The structure of the book is how chapters, section, subsections and the index are related to each other. You can learn about the structure by taking a look at the index, reading chapter intros/outros/summaries, and you will get a better feeling for it while reading the book as well. The content is basically just everything in the book except any meta-content, such as headings, the index and references, etc... So graphs, text, chapters, blablalba The details of the book are the most relevant, precise, thought-out content, you could alternatively call these "topics". Consider a given chapter of any book, it usually introduces a topic, gives some examples, counterexamples, might tell a story about it, it could add a debate, show a graph, and it might describe sub-topics. The whole chapter is mostly about that topic as a whole anyway. That's the detail. Lastly, the "cohesion" is how the book's topics are interrelated on a detailed level. For example, what implications does the content introduced in chapter 5 have on chapter 6? And on chapter 4? Some concepts take multiple chapters (or books!) to comprehend as a whole. Sometimes a book needs to introduce some concepts before the bigger picture can be explained. This cohesion, in my mind, is related to the "larger than the sum of its parts" idea. I guess the idea of cohesion can also be extended to how the book's content and ideas relate to what you already know, or other books you may or may not have read. Again; it's how the topics interrelate. Different reading styles, writing exercises and re-readings of a book will give expand your understanding in those 4 layers. For example, skimming (30 min, skip through entire book) will give you a vague but helpful foundational feeling for the structure and cohesion of the book. Likewise, speed-reading will give a reasonable foundational feeling for the content and detail of the book. Writing a mind-map of a chapter, asking questions about paragraphs, summarizing chapters will improve your understanding of the content and topics. I personally feel that I often don't completely "understand" a book, I believe that if I take the time to work on those 4 layers of understanding on every level of the book, I would. I strongly strongly strongly recommend taking a look at the book "how to read a book", the concepts I just stated are my own, but the book helped me completely rethink about how I approach reading in general. I used to be afraid of tacking huge books, I feel like I can actually read them with some confidence #ENDRAMBLE
  • 8y ago
• galfarragem 8y ago
  Taking notes and making a book summary seems to be the most efficient way. I used to do it informally but after taking inspiration from Derek Sivers I do it more formally [0]. [0] https://sivers.org/book https://sivers.org/book