A Simple 5-Steps Framework for Software Engineers to Take Notes and Apply Book Insights Effectively: Part 1

A Step-by-Step Guide to Note-Taking That Enhances Application and Teaching Skills for Software Engineers

Foto di Jasmine Coro su Unsplash

Software engineers need to be Professional Learners.

Being a software engineer means you live in a continuously evolving world. Technologies change every month. You want to learn new practices multiple times a year.

Reading is a crucial skill you must master to be an effective learner.

I’m not speaking of fiction in this case. While I love reading fantasy books, I am talking about technical books we read to improve our daily work. They could be about any topic like programming, technology, software architecture, leadership, and soft skills.

These kinds of books are investments.

You invest your time, most of the time it is your free time, to learn new things. When you read a technical book, you can’t just go through it and finish it. It is different from reading a story.

By the end of the book, you want to keep something with you forever.

You want to apply and teach what you learned to someone else. You want to elaborate your knowledge and be able to use it in your specific case. This is how you differentiate yourself from the average reader, bragging about how many books per year they read.

So, in this post and the following ones, I will teach you my method to achieve the following objectives:

1. Extract the best pieces of knowledge from technical books.

2. Organize what you learn so that you can search for it whenever you need it.

3. Remember what you learned.

4. Understand what you learned.

5. Apply and teach what you learned.

If you apply this method consistently, you will achieve all these objectives.

The Framework

The framework consists of these steps:

1. Read and Mark

2. Transfer

3. Write and Re-Write

4. Think and Re-Think

5. Create

Let’s start explaining step 1.

1. Read and Mark

During this step, you only need 2 things: your book and a pencil.

This is the step where you read your book. The pencil is used to highlight important passages. It is pretty simple, but let me explain the differences between reading a paper book and an ebook.

Paper books

When reading a paper book, you can be creative with your highlighting.

Many people like to use different marks to differentiate concepts and topics. I don’t; I’m lazy, and I want to get things done. I have limited reading time, so I want to optimize my reading.

This doesn’t mean that I want to read faster, but I minimize the effort to highlight.

I started with the typical underline:

This is how I learned to study at school and university. As you can see, I’m not the kind of person who likes to use a ruler. The result is those messy lines.

Also, I realized that underlining took too much time, and again, I wanted to focus on reading.

Reading should be an enjoyable activity. I thought, how can I make this easier? What is the purpose of a highlight?

The answer is simple: find important passages easily.

I realized that most of the time, I just used the underline to find an important line. The underline finished with the sentence itself. So, why can’t I highlight the start of the sentence?

That’s why I started using arrows:

While writing this post, I found these pages that show the exact moment I shifted from underline to a star and, finally, to an arrow. As you can see on the left, I used a star to highlight a specific paragraph. On the right, I used the arrows, and underlines on both pages show that I was still experimenting.

Even if arrows represent a considerable speed improvement, I realized that a simple line could achieve the same result.

The highlight's purpose is to find essential passages on a page easily. The reason for this will become clear in step 2, Transfer. So, using the blank spaces on the side of a page. Using a simple line is incredibly fast and efficient.

Ebooks

Ebooks are entirely different from paper books.

I read both ebooks and paper books. I think reading one or the other is a personal preference. I find advantages in both.

However, when it comes to marking important things in ebooks, I always use the highlight function of the ebook reader.

The problem I had with messy lines is irrelevant in an ebook reader. Also, the speed of highlighting a passage is higher than doing it with a pencil. But there’s more.

In step 2, Transfer, I will explain the importance of exporting highlights from your ebook reader.

For this reason, using the highlight function of your ebook reader is crucial. Highlighting the entire sentence is essential to make it work properly.

Read and Mark Common Mistakes

The Read and Mark step consists of reading concepts and marking important ones.

While reading and marking happen at the same moment, they should not occur at the same time. When you read, you should focus on reading. When you mark, focus on marking.

Don’t read and mark at the same time.

If you read and mark a sentence immediately, you can make 2 mistakes:

1. Double marking.

2. Fear of losing ideas.

1. Double Marking

Double marking happens when a concept is explained multiple times in the same chapter, paragraph, or page.

This is a good thing since the author uses different words, and reading them in various ways can help you understand them. But if you mark the concept the first time, you might be forced to mark it again when you find a better explanation.

That’s how you finish marking twice the same concept.

2. Fear of Losing Ideas

Fear of losing ideas is the fear of forgetting about something you just read.

When you read, you might fear that if you don’t highlight a concept immediately, you’ll forget it. This is a common mistake when people highlight books for the first time. The thing is, you are not going to forget things immediately.

This is how you finish marking entire paragraphs.

How To Fix Read and Mark Mistakes

When you read, you should only focus on that.

Forget about marks and focus on acquiring knowledge. Focus on what you are reading and ensure you understand it. Do not mark or highlight concepts.

If you finish an entire paragraph or a page, you get a clearer understanding of an idea.

This is essential to understand the core concept. Once you get the general idea, you are ready to mark what’s essential for you. That’s the moment when you go back and highlight.

Finish one paragraph or a page, understand the general idea, and then start marking.

Summary

Let’s wrap up the Read and Mark step rules:

1. Paper books → mark important concepts on the side of the page.

2. Ebooks → use the highlight function of your ebook reader.

3. Separate the Read and Mark phases.

4. Understand the general idea and then start marking.

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