Studying books from cover to cover

[median27]

Do you still study your book from cover to cover even if some of its topic were not included in your course syllabus (just finding those topics essential but not required)?

Do you study them during weekends, holidays, or vacati0ns?

Im just curious.

 

[chiro]

Do you still study your book from cover to cover even if some of its topic were not included in your course syllabus (just finding those topics essential but not required)?

Do you study them during weekends, holidays, or vacati0ns?

Im just curious.

This is just my view but personally I'd rather on a problem that's related to what I'm doing than just doing all textbook problems.

Like when I used to do heavy coding, I'd build libraries for use in my own projects. So for example I wrote a scripting framework that was similar to XML, and the framework abstracted away the script execution so that custom code would turn a script block definition into a binary resource managed by a resource manager. The script manager used a resource manager for resource management, a protocol layer built into the resource manager managed syncing and distributed management while the script system used the kind of stuff in a CORBA model to link class factories to run-time DLLs and then provide one-to-one functionality between resource and script (ie all resources export their text script-definition and all script-definitions export a binary resource). This kind of thing took a while but it was easy for me to be motivated about it and that made a big difference.

That was a real problem and I had to think about things from design to implementation.

I couldn't find the motivation to do all problems from start to end in a book. For people that can do it, then that's all good too, but I would lose interest. Real problems are a lot easier to get motivated for even if they are significantly harder than textbook problems.

Also I should point out that some problems out there that are not in a textbook can be just as or even more valuable. Problems that may take months or years to solve can bring about results that really dwarf those of a textbook problem. It's definitely going to be easier in a lot of cases to work on those with the right motivation/mindset and the potential rewards of those kind of problems (especially if you solved or made any kind of breakthrough) would easily trump that of solving a standard text-book problem.

 

[fluidistic]

Do you still study your book from cover to cover even if some of its topic were not included in your course syllabus (just finding those topics essential but not required)?

Not me; I feel like I don't have time for that. I have an upper undergrad course that uses parts of the first half (for this semester) of Jackson's book. This would be totally insane for me to try to understand the entire book, alone.
In numerical analysis our professor follows more or less Kincaid's book. Again we see less topics than the book covers. I can of course read about the extra topics but I don't have time to fully read them all and then do all the exercises.
I usually uses book to understand my courses and I don't need to read extra chapters most of the time. If I don't understand something I'd use the Internet.