Cookies and Capacitors

The final post about annotating books

Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 3:01PM

OHMYGOD, I can’t believe I’ve never annotated my books before! I feel so in-tune with the ideas in the pages! I feel like I understand the material 1000x better!

I just went through the first two chapters of Practical C++ Programming by Steve Oualline, marking up the pages as I went along, and I’m astounded at how much information I’ve retained (for the short term, anyway). I found myself compiling “Hello, world!” examples on the command line and in Xcode, writing down notes about modern syntax (the book was published in 1995). At the end of the chapter, I wrote a summary of the important chapter notes, and I wrote end-of-the-chapter thoughts which explain why things are done the way they are, and elaborate upon how I see things (i.e. I wrote about using g++ to start off, to gain a better understanding of how the compiler works, and use an IDE later when there are multiple source files, and when there’s more to gain by using an IDE than what can be learned by using the command line).

This is just the start of a beautiful relationship between my beloved books and me.