Hacker News Reader

Comment by banana_maker | Hacker News Reader

Deep, focused reading is a muscle that you need to work on. There isn’t a real answer other than practice, and focus on delayed gratification.

We skim websites/articles because there is so much information out there, and not all of it is useful. I skim articles and then go back to fully read them once I make sure they’re actually worth the time. Same with some books, but books generally are worth it since they went through the publishing process, etc.

View on HN

This is right, however we also need to acknowledge the prevalence of books which put forth some good ideas, but which perhaps can be summarized in a page or so. Instead they choose to labor on and on around the same point(s) without adding much.

A book that definitely wasn't in the category I described above (for me) was John Ousterhout's Philosophy of Software Design - https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-John-Ouste... . I haven't run into software design/tech books like that very often.

From the reviews it sounds mainly from the OO/Java and heavy design up front paradigm and not very Agile / test driven. Is that fair? I'd really like a philosophically minded book that integrates these relatively newer approaches.

I consider myself very agile/test-driven-leaning and I got a lot out of the book. It provided nice restatements of many things I've vaguely thought over the years and some nice new ideas.

The book came out of Ousterhout's course on software design where he reviews student code as they work on a significant problem - building a text editor. There is very little (if any) material out there of this nature that goes much beyond personal opinion (usually under the guise of experience) and sloganeering. This one though, is a hearty dive into the delectable details of design.

Second that book! I have read dozens of technical books, but none come close in practical wisdom. If you have been in the industry and worked on large projects you will find it very relevant. I hope it is also as relevant and easy to understand for people who do not have many years of experience already.

I actually find the opposite.

Many books belabor the point and take a chapter to explain what a paragraph could.

It might sometimes be useful - for example, to explain a scenario to a newbie who can't relate from their own experience - but for someone who's been in the industry for a while, most of that information is just not useful.

Called US writing style over here, just being overly verbose. Course literature, e.g. Calculus, suffers from this. It is a style in which you wax on and drive home the point by repetition.

This style is popular nowdays and finding books that succintcly describes a subject is hard. This is mostly because you need to have common ground, and writing for the smallest common denominator is better.

I actually think Calculus textbooks are justified in being long. he material is just so hard to grasp for newbies that giving you more and more examples sort of provides you with more time to digest the ideas in the background. Many students need that at that stage in their studies.

Writing succinctly is a difficult skill that requires practice. The US government has put a lot of work into making things easier to understand in recent years. I have a Masters in Public Administration. My professors hammered home the idea that lawmakers and the public aren't going to read your 50 page policy analysis, so matter how brilliant it is. My final paper in Project Management class was worth 25% of my final grade and had a one-page limit. It's one of the most difficult projects I've ever had. If you're interested in learning more about this style of writing, check out plainlanguage.gov.

Relatedly, but I've always wished there were a series of books like, "I'm Already a Programmer but I'd Like to Learn ____"

Trying to pick up a book about a new programming language that is trying to explain the concept of an 'array' or whatever is annoying--I wish there was something to just lay out (still in a thoughtful and guided way) the concepts I needed to understand for that language based on already knowing several others.

It would be nice if the table of contents marked where to start if you're already familiar with programming concepts.

Learnxinyminutes?

Agreed! I've only found a few great examples of books like this, such as Advanced R. There's a lot of "You can skip this chapter if you already know how to answer the following questions..."

I had this exact problem.

I set a single New Years Resolution goal to build this muscle: 12 books in this year. I’ve read 22 now.

What compels me to keep reading is the Reading Insights Streak feature in Kindle. It’s like a little reminder I can always check on to see if I’ve read today or not.

It seems like if you need to remind yourself if you’ve read today or not you aren’t doing “deep reading”.

Schopenhauer’s essay “On Reading” is instructive here. He recommends reading fewer books but going deeper into them.

While listening to Derek Sivers and Shane Parish talk about reading, I found Derek's comment to be, what I think, is a way to 'go deeper': assuming you've made highlights in a book, when you finish it, spend time thinking about each highlight. Take unnecessary words out of the highlighted text. Get to the core of the words that really triggered you to think different. I've yet to do this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com