There's a lot of filler in there, but one advice that I found interesting was to write right back what you're reading (I take it to refer to technical material and not exposition - e.g. proofs and definitions). Anyone has any experience with trying that?
(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs and formulas down as I was reading them).
Yeah this is something I do frequently. I discovered it while studying for my qualifying exam. When I first took the exam, I failed using the same study methods I used in undergrad. I realized the scope of information I had to know was much too broad to be able cram or understand through past homework problems. So as I went through my study materials I wrote down the material after reading in designated sections, keeping the summaries to just one page. Then during further review I used these pages of notes. The second time I took the exam I got 100%.
When I would study for exams, I found the process of writing notes would be almost more useful than the process of reviewing them. The process of writing notes made me boil the concepts down into more discrete forms, and the physical action of writing helped with the memorization. A few days before an exam, I would often find myself re-reading my old notes and condensing them down into briefer notes, eliminating full explanations of concepts in favor of keywords or mental links to the full note sets.
The net result was that when I was in my exams, I would find myself mentally looking at my notes, and finding a formula or something would just be a matter of 'reading' them.
I used to write summaries for all study materials as I was reading. It helps get a better broad view, I think, and it also encourages writing down any related thoughts that come to your head.
I have found that it is best to summarize in a question-answer format, much like a FAQ. Having questions separated from the answers is useful later when revising and the questions are more open-ended than a straight summary.
There's a website that a friend and I set up to store exactly such question lists (with answers): http://www.problemata.com . It's rough, but already usable.
(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs and formulas down as I was reading them).