Reading to Remember

Topics fly by when learning them in school. Struggling to keep up with the following assignment while trying to read seminal journal articles leads me to forget the material as quickly as I learn it. Two weeks out of class, I wonder if I learned anything. However, looking back a few years, my general understanding of computer science has expanded even if the details disappear.

To battle the forget monster, I've been reading about topics I was previously exposed to in school. I often get more out of it the second time, and it also makes me feel better that I am more familiar with the topic than I realized.

The tricky part is finding time to read while I'm in the next class. A topic I need to read about for an upcoming class is C++, but a topic I am motivated to read about from previous work is operating systems. In my mind, the two are closely related because my operating system classes had assignments in C and C++. My next class is Database Implementation, where we will write a database from scratch (in C++). I'm excited.

The book I will read (or skim) during the holiday break is Learning Modern C++ for Finance: Foundations for Quantitative Programming by Daniel Hanson. I chose it because it was published this year and says "Modern C++" in the title. It might be too finance-heavy for me, though.