Beyond notation and ordering, I have had the best results reading and comprehending complex concepts, including mathematics, by taking the following suggestion to the extreme:<p>> Read with pencil and paper in hand, making up little examples for yourself as you go on.<p>I like to find a difficult question that I can answer with an understanding of the material. This acts as a litmus test of my understanding and a forcing function.<p>The question can be almost anything, but a general approach I use is to write a "compiler" that maps some concept from the material to a concept I already understand (this normally takes the form of a denotational semantics). Then the question would be, "How can I interpret X as Y?" This technique has its limits since the material can't be too far afield from something I already know and the idea isn't novel but it has been effective for me. The critical bit is forcing myself to write down a fairly comprehensive mapping function. This gets me into the dark corners of my understanding very quickly and adds new questions to answer.
Funny how utterly natural and subconsious this stuff becomes after a while. I almost felt like commenting something snyde about how superfluous it is to make it this explicit, but then I realized that it was only a few years ago that it made my consious brain totally overwhelmed.
Right now I'm studying for my math final for computer engineering. This really does speak to me as I often don't understand certain parts of the chapter and just skip ahead to the exercises and then I try to reflect back to the theory. Thank god that I don't have to learn a single proof though.<p>Alright, back to studying.