Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information?
I do not have advice directly addressing your question about how to read, but I will say this:<p>A lot of this complex-dense-technical stuff is difficult precisely because it can get abstract. That is true for example in writing proper C for kernel development (your field) and physics (my old field) and chess (everybody&#x27;s field).<p>My solution is to do lots of exercises and learn lots of examples before learning these big theories. Essentially I think learning is fundamentally Pain. You have to take on the pain before the learning can alleviate it, if you try to skip the pain then you have only a superficial idea of what you&#x27;re talking about.<p>So like if I am learning Go, I am writing a command line Fibonacci calculator in it, then I am rewriting this ground-up with test driven development so that I can learn what testing looks like in Go, then I might try to build an HTTP server, then I might connect it to a database, then I might learn how to mock the database. Each of these tasks I am setting for myself needs to be answered by consulting tutorials and references, but if I just follow a tutorial I will not build true knowledge, I will just know how to do things when someone is holding my hand.