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Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

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Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

#1

Post by _benj »

When in the past I've picked up a reference manual or something of the sort I'd go slowly, lookup every word I didn't understand and started experimenting as soon as possible.

But that is quite time consuming and intense. I've been considering skimming through the whole things to get kind of a big picture of what the thing is and where I'm going and then going back a second time to catch then the details and experiment.

Any other ideas? How do you tackle learning something new and complicated?

(ps. the complicated thing for me right now is kernel development, including writing proper C)

Re: Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

#3

Post by korijn »

Learning new things just takes a lot of time. In my experience the method doesn't really make a huge difference. Your conscious effort is the part you control, the unconscious effort you also need to make is not really something you can force. Don't forget to rest/sleep so there is time for your brain to process things in the background.

Re: Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

#5

Post by tomlong »

I've learnt recently (not much former higher education) the power of making long hand notes on pen and paper. It helps me connect with and think through the material and take it in at a pace I can process it.

It's not quite the same, but I recently studied for a technical exam/certification where the syllabus included about 400 slides (about 10 days of teaching & lab work). I failed the exam just reviewing the slides, even when it was sat quite quickly after I had taken the courses.

The next time I sat it several months after doing the training, I spent about a day and a half writing out the slides. I went through two A4 pads and a couple of pens. I will never review my notes (I have the searchable PDFs), but I found that exam really easy the second time round.

Re: Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

#6

Post by zitterbewegung »

I do this by creating a side project with a concrete objective. I then do my best executing the side project.

After I get something useful doing the Side project then I try to give a presentation about the side project.

Note that I have failed multiple times with getting something useful enough to justify the Side project.

Another way you can do this is just promise to give a presentation about the topic at a local meetup. And keep on giving presentations about it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

#7

Post by greggeter »

tomlong wrote: post #5

I've learnt recently (not much former higher education) the power of making long hand notes on pen and paper. It helps me connect with and think through the material and take it in at a pace I can process it. It's not quite the same, but I recently studied for a technical exam/certification where the syllabus included about 400 slides (about 10 days of teaching & lab work). I failed the exam just reviewing the slides…

I second this.

I studied for the PMP exam by hand writing the glossary in the back of the study guide then outlining each chapter, again, long hand. Hand writing the glossary helped me recognize important topics in the chapters as I read through them.

I read through my notes once before the test. I did all this over the course of a week in the evenings. Maybe spent 12 hours total. Passed the test.

Re: Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

#8

Post by IvanVergiliev »

I'm a big fan of the idea of using Spaced Repetition for this. The idea is that it allows you to both:

- be able to keep your knowledge / understanding of an area around for the long term; but also

- be able to gradually build up your understanding by first committing the fundamentals to memory, and then using that to build up your level of abstraction and get to the more complex ideas and principles.

Michael Nielsen has written fairly extensive explanations of two slightly different approaches in:

- Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics [1]

- Augmenting Long-term Memory [2]

I've only used this particular approach for a handful of subjects so far - indeed, it seems to just take time to build a high-quality, long-term understanding of a thing. However, I've been pretty happy with the process so far.

[1] http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics [2] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

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