Reading to Remember
Topics fly by when learning them in school. The rapid pace and frantic struggle to keep up with assignments and lectures while reading seminal journal articles make me feel like I forget the material as quickly as I learn. Two weeks out of class, I wonder if I learned anything. Looking at where I came from just a few years ago shows me that I am learning a lot.
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++).
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.
UPDATE: Learning Modern C++ for Finance is a good book. I avoided many of the math-heavy finance concepts but did get a lot out of the parts that were more about the C++ language. I am now in the middle of the Database Implementation class, and I'm very glad I reviewed C++ beforehand. But the C++ in this class hasn't been too rough so far. The challenge on the last assignment was concurrency and locking pages. At one point, I felt like no matter what I did, I could not get it right. But I realized that one particular function was too complex - it was doing too much. It was also where the primary locks were. I deleted and rewrote the function and was able to fix the problem within a few minutes of the rewrite. I am not sure the locking/concurrency was perfect, but it was good enough to pass the automated tests for the assignment.
The book I'm reading for class - Database System Concepts (7th edition) (ISBN: 9780078022159) - is very good. I've enjoyed the sections I'm reading for class.