There's this free online course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn which I think might be preferable to the book in the article, since it has transcribed video that you can speed up, exercises, and quizzes.
The best (er.. only) trick I remember: rather than re-reading material, reflect on it for a few minutes after you've read it, trying to recall and organize it in your mind.
Few additional tricks I picked up: * Recall(as you mentioned) is critical to understanding. Effective recall also connects a topic just learned with other known topics. * A problem looks solvable but its important to actually apply yourself and arrive at the solution. The process of learning does not offer rewards until the mind has been exercised. * Deliberate practice of poorly understood concepts. Don't fall into the trap of fooling yourself to believe that you have understood a concept or practicing problems that you are already good at. * Read through material quickly to to create a "framework" or stick-figures in the mind. Gradually add new concepts to the basic framework. * Learning is best done with frequent breaks to absorb information. Learning is also a passive process where the neurons need time to grow. * Repetition spaced across several days forces us to recall. This helps strengthen memories and filing concepts into long-term memory bank. * Better sleep helps.
I could go on. Really wonderful course.
My take is this - you learn best when you are curious or can get curious about something. That kind of learning sticks. Or maybe I'm just different.
The course teaches not just "how to learn" but really "how to learn and become a master of the subject". While being curious and interested definitely gets the learning cart rolling, I doubt one can become a master without deliberately focusing on weak areas of understanding, practice and reflection -- all painful tedious stuff. For me learning sticks when I associate it with things I already know, zoomed in and out a couple of times to both understand a concept itself and how it fits in the big picture. So I do believe having "a method" to learn and deploy new learnings.
Some like me grew up in a culture of rote learning where we repeatedly read and smear the same text over and over again hoping something would stick. A lot of the teaching of the courses were completely counter-intuitive to me. I have spent close to 25k hours studying CS in an academic setting and could have saved myself so much time studying effectively. I've been working in SV for several years now and into some serious studying again so this course was very timely for me.