I was wondering how do you read technical books. Do you prefer paper book or eBook? Highlight text or underline? Do you use any special app? Any special summarizing technique?<p>I like to use Goodreader in my iPad. It let's me create a generated "mini-book" containing all the notes and underlined text with references to the pages containing it.
Slowly.<p>I'm not that smart so I go through tech books slowly so I can hopefully retain more of it and maybe even apply the knowledge day to day as I acquire it. I've always been jealous of people who rip through a dense (knowledge dense, not pages dense) tech book in a weekend and say they got it all.<p>The books that are more code oriented, I read on the computer so that I can type and run the code as I work through the book.<p>The books that are more theory or higher level I read on an e-reader.
I have a nook (needed a reader and couldn't wait for amazon shipping. Retail's not dead!). I'll load up pdfs/ebooks to it and read them when I'm commuting. It's pretty convenient but I do often wish I had a real textbook for really heavy stuff, though probably don't want to either lug that around or even read it on a commute.
as someone who just has finished writing a book, I think skimming the TOC and index are an important part to get an idea of the book's content. If I decide I want to delve into the book, I actually still like paper, since you can easy back and forth, and especially diagrams and code often are much more clear in print.