How to read technical books

Personal experience of getting a real understanding, not an illusion of it

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Amazon with a book recommendation, and I was about to follow the usual “take a quick look — archive” routine, but this time the recommendation was good. The book was called “Streaming Systems,” and it had the same red O’Reilly design as “Designing Data-Intensive Applications.” With the hope that the former would be similar to the latter, I’ve placed an order.

It feels great to order and receive books, but it’s an entirely different story to read them. It is exciting to open the package and take a look at the contents, but further reading requires some discipline, some time allocated to it, free of Netflix and other things. Especially technical books, full of complicated principles and examples.

Until today I’ve been reading the book as usual: I would deliberately set some amount of time, sit down, open the book, and start reading. But today I decided to go a little bit different route and not only read but also take notes.

The difference was staggering.

I realized how much of an illusion of understanding I had when I was just reading. Whatever the content of the sentence was, there was a feeling, “ok, I got it. Maybe not all of it…