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The Benjamin Franklin Method of Reading Programming Books

• The Benjamin Franklin Method of Reading Programming Books | Path-Sensitive
• Experts have mental representations that are structured and abstracted.
• These expert mental representations are also compressed. They take a larger number of pieces of information and re-encode it as a shorter piece of structured information.
• For example, an expert chess player remembers groups of pieces that enact lines of force on other groups of pieces.
• For more on information compression, see Claude Shannon on information theory.
• For more on expert mental representations, see Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.
• When you work through an O'Reilly-type book about a concept (e.g. a language or framework), there are lots of examples the reader is encouraged to, at best, type out, and, at worst, copy and paste. This means the reader doesn't need to build a mental representation more complex than a string of characters. This representation is the analogue of which pieces are on which squares of a chess board.
• Benjamin Franklin had a technique that forced him to build a mental representation of a writing style he admired:

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.

— Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

• Other examples of ways other people in other fields build compressed, structured mental representations
  • Artists practice by trying to imitate a great work.
  • A mathematician proving the theorems in a paper as they read it.
  • A programmer can read the code samples in a programming book. They then close the book and try to implement the code.

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