When it comes to reading I’m coming from a different corner: I read a lot of philosophical books from philosophers like Adorno, Marcuse, Marx before I really started reading tech books. These books are hard to read, especially the works of the Frankfurt School are notorious for their specific language which is sometimes hard to decipher. Tech books are exactly the opposite: while there are entertaining technical writers with a good style a lot use a pretty common and dry vocabulary – which is a good thing. The thing is, you don’t really need to read tech books.

Novels, philosophical – and more general humanistic – works are much harder. They often transport semantics in metaphors you don’t get when just reading. You have to read a sentence more than once to get it. But when you read a book about Design Patterns, your favourite book on PHP or something similar non-algorithm related you can just scan the book for news, read and understand the code samples and go on, page per page. Scan through the page, take notes but just note what’s new to you. If it is a reference, mark the important parts with stickers. Ignore the rest, remember, don’t read, just scan.

Additionally technical books tend to have a foreword and a foreword for the second edition and a forward for the third edition and a lot of testimonials attesting how good this book is (hey, I already purchased it, don’t sell it to me again). So the real content starts at page 40. Excluding white pages the book that was 400 pages long might shrink to 300 pages. If you need 30 seconds per page that means you can read the book in two and a half hours. And 30 seconds per page a a pessimistic estimation. With this technique it is possible to read a technical book in a day without stress and totally relaxed in a week. That means you could read 52 tech books a year. I’m lame, I just read scanned around 20 last year.