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

for topics that are well established, I highly recommend using a textbook! Since a college or grad level course is intended to give someone a lot of background, historical and otherwise, they tend to cover a wide range of information and can be more efficient than piecing together knowledge from blog posts and reference docs.

Systems, networking, databases, machine learning have fantastic resources available. I usually look up the syllabus of a course at Stanford or MIT and check out their recommended reading. Some professors publish their own books for free as PDFs as well.

I second using SRS--it's been very helpful for me to remember API minutiae or commands that I would otherwise have to google each time I needed it.

For programming topics, I also try to make sure I'm using the information. I unfortunately have too many cards about topics that I never actually used, and they are frustrating upon review because I never had some practical structure to place them into mentally. Don't waste time trying to memorize thing you don't ever use.

That said, SRS is good for memorizing trivia if you want to do that too. I've been using the Anki deck Ultimate Geography for a couple of months to memorize every country, capital, their flag, and location on a map. Useless, but kinda fun.

Time and practice, there is no shortcut.

All such information looks daunting at first. But then, over the course of time, things get connected, get familiar, and make more sense.

Quoting Linus on a topic directly linked to what you're studying[0]:

> Because you should never ever think that you're clever enough to write your own locking routines.. Because the likelihood is that you aren't (and by that "you" I very much include myself - we've tweaked all the in-kernel locking over decades, and gone through the simple test-and-set to ticket locks to cacheline-efficient queuing locks, and even people who know what they are doing tend to get it wrong several times). There's a reason why you can find decades of academic papers on locking. Really. It's hard.

This is only about a single area of kernel development. While not really about how to learn something quickly, I still think one thing that's very important is keeping in mind that learning complex things takes time, potentially a lot, and that it all depends on your objectives, i.e. what level of understanding you want to achieve. So maybe your method of learning is actually what's working best for you. Maybe the speed at which you grasp concepts and internalize learnings is not as fast as you'd like, but maybe going faster would leave you with shallower knowledge.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't look for more efficient ways and methods of learning, but I think it's still important to keep in mind.

[0]https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=189711&curpost...

This is how I learn mixed with understanding the tool / framework / language from a first principles point.