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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer, it's not as easy to get through technical books in such short amounts of time.

A book a month would be a more achievable goal, if still unreasonable if they're all technical books. You can't speed read technical books, specially if they're about new topics that require practical exercises.

Reading x books doesn't count as learning x topics.

I don't know if there are people who can learn complex topics by reading a book, but I certainly can't. Without any context, I can't keep enough of it in my head for long enough to build a mental model of the whole system. At best I'll come away with a vague familiarity with some of terminology. I have to actually implement parts of it to retain it.

Agree with this sentiment. With the exception of very specific topics that I've encountered in the wild but have no theoretical context on (e.g. Async JS), I have never been able to learn from a book. Tutorials/blog posts are great for this because you can stop and implement.

With technical books I find it very important to actually apply them. So one technical book per year may be enough. I made good money doing C++ for more than decade and had maybe 3 books that I understood more and more over the years.

Another thing with technical books is that you can read portions of them and interleave several books (or books + papers). I have 4 or 5 books going on at a time, and I make progress in each most weeks. Usually not all on one topic, either.

And then you can mix in other readings. A chapter in a technical book may only survey its particular material, but you may want to explore the ideas further. So you go out and get some papers to read or another book.

I may not finish many books in a year, but I do get a lot of reading in.

That's what I like about reading technical books. I have 3 books (textbooks, really) that I'm reading right now, and I don't feel like I have to finish one before picking up the other. I can read whatever I feel like reading.

Even though I love fiction, I couldn't pick up a second book from Stephen King without fully finishing the first. I'd lose interest in the first one otherwise.

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