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Comment by hzhou321 | Hacker News Reader

Only use one notebook at a time. Always write down a date first, on every page if your notes spans to another page. Write down your notes sequentially. Had a diagram in the middle of the page? Continue notes at next page unless you are annotating the diagram. It's much easier to find things when there is a single media in linear form. Having mixed notes is fine. Having a linear order is more important. I would write down my shopping list if I am think of that in the middle of figuring out an algorithm, draw a box around my shopping list, and continue with my algorithm notes.

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Also, number all the pages except the last two, which don't need numbers because they're where you will keep an index by topic.

Even across multiple volumes, that index will serve the same purpose for your notes as it does for a database, this after all being whence RDBMS designers borrowed the term: an index allows you to perform lookups in sublinear time.

By indices, do you mean reverse indices like at the end of textbooks?

My notebook indexes map from a topic to the numbers of pages with relevant content, in the conventional fashion.

I don't know what a reverse index is in the sense you mean here, but I would like to find out. Would you mind giving a brief description? I tried some searches, but found no useful result.

I think this might be a second language thing. My understanding of index would be the one you have at the beginning of the book, with the chapters and their page numbers. The reverse index appears at the end of the book and lists topics and the pages where they appear.

For example, in the index you'd have chapters:

    3. Data structures 25
    [...]
    7. Graphs 154

And in the reverse index:

    trees: 25, 154

But maybe those are just the table of contents and index?

Ah, I see. Those are indeed the names I'm accustomed as a native anglophone to use for those respective sections.

edit: Commenting before coffee, I mixed up "anglophile" and "anglophone," intending the latter.

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