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

If someone is looking to type or at the screen, whoever taught them to type failed them. This sounds like the same stupdity of pair programming where "one can type while the other thinks." I'd be curious to see differences in note-taking retention between those who can touch-type and the hunt and peckers.

For me, the benefits of digital are too many: sorting, searching, organizing and of course the backups. I'm also left-handed and do not miss my school days where I would end up with smudges on my hand. I might buy that scrawling something out by hand leads to slightly higher retention rates than touch-typing notes, if only because the ROM is much higher, or it forces you to either go more slowly, allowing more time for reflection (Neal Stephenson wrote the Baroque cycle this way because of this), or have to condense lecture notes more, which would require more active thinking.

1. Give yourself time and accept that there will be things where you will get terribly stuck.

2. Ideally work with other people, or find other people trying to learn the same thing that you can exchange meaningful questions and comments with.

3. Allocate chunks of uninterrupted study time every day, but don't force yourself to hit rigid targets (e.g. I need to do 1 chapter a day etc.).

4. Go through the material slowly and never gloss over smth that you didn't understand. How do you know you understood it? Try to explain it to somebody else, try to explain it to yourself in the simplest way possible, ask yourself any question no matter how dumb, no matter how absurd regarding that thing.

5. When you're stuck on something try to ask other people, use the internet etc. If you're still stuck make a note of the thing and come back to it not too far in the future.

6. Make sure that you don't let too much time pass without actually applying the knowledge. If you're reading a textbook try to do the exercises, even the weird looking ones. Once you know enough, make a little project, re-implement something yourself, prove things on your own without looking at the textbook etc.

7. Try to review things later on, even if you understood them well. You will often see them in a new light.

8. Use multiple reference texts for the same kind of material, but try to have one main one that you're following closely.

I hope you will find some of these ideas useful.

Perhaps you need to do more than a superficial reading, as they suggest.

In seriousness, I found it very good and deep. Perhaps I just was lacking in my education, and you may have had learned the lessons they sought to impart before you read it. To each their own.

First, I'll go to youtube, hoping that someone gave a talk about whatever tech it is, these are good because talks often distill the high level architecture into a 45 minute presentation and it gives a decent starting point to understanding the minutia.

However, what often ends up happening is I see lots of videos and pick up nearly nothing (as most are not talks, they are mostly indian people making course materials).

After I fail to do the youtube thing, I usually go to the quickstart guides, or copying example code and messing with whatever it is, stepping through each item of the code or futzing the configuration to try to make it do weird things, reading up documentation on each config key.

After that I start branching out into other areas, how do I make whatever it is much different? if it's software, how do I scale it, what are the individual components- if it's a library; what else does it support etc;

I very rarely read an entire manual, but after back-and-forthing a bunch of times with experimentation I have usually read a huge chunk of the manual.

However where this really fell down was with kubernetes, as a concept it's very large and hard to break down into smaller sub-components, and when you're testing the entire thing at once it feels like "magic inside" which is not ideal for my method of experimenting (try/break/fix/repeat) as too much breaks at once.

You wouldn't teach kids soccer by having them practice cone drills without a ball - they need to play a game first!