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Oh--just that I couldn't understand the first chapter in Stepanov fully on first reading, so I need to read it again (and again, and again).

The Feynman reference is

  Well, I asked him, “How can I read it? 
  It’s so hard.” He said, “You start at the 
  beginning and you read as far as you can 
  get, until you are lost. Then you start at 
  the beginning again, and you keep working 
  through until you can understand the whole 
  book.”

  —Joan Feynman, Richard Feynman’s sister, 
   recalling a discussion with her brother
From https://rs.io/feynman-reading-difficult-things/


That takes quadratic time though, assuming one “gets lost” with roughly constant likelihood throughout new text. I’m sure there must be a better way.


It would indeed take forever, even assuming we are not only reading, but writing notes too.

The only way through is to make it computable: writing programs and making it concrete.

Another is to obsess over it externally: taping index cards up on the walls, ruminating on it in the bath, and transferring that to software.

There's just too much to learn now. My bet is on first principles from cheap books, but the world keeps turning.

What has worked for you?




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