315 karma · joined February 14, 2017
I read the textbook over a couple of months, but I couldn't give you a good estimate in hours.
When I started learning, the recommended textbook was Distributed systems: Principles and Paradigms (the new recommendation is Designing Data-Intensive Applications) and the recommended course was MIT 6.824.
6.824 is the first online course that I have completed fully and it was well worth it. I read, took notes, and summarized all required course readings (around 20 papers) and completed the labs, which involved creating a raft-based key-value store. The labs were especially useful because they forced me to really understand the details of the topics I had learned (e.g., MapReduce, Raft, Raft’s log compaction) in order for my code to pass all the tests.
I’m very happy with the results of following the course and I now plan to put the same amount of effort into other topics.
For technical books, I take notes as I read. Once I reach the end of a chapter, I reword the rough notes and research anything I didn't fully understand. You can read my notes if you're interested: https://notes.eddyerburgh.me/
For fiction books, I highlight paragraphs I find interesting as I read on my kindle . When I finish, I use my highlights to write a short review of the book.
I've stopped reading most self-help/ business books now. I just read other people's notes on them instead.