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: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's field).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're talking about.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.