Current reading methodologies for CLRS

What I am doing now is essentially a kind of multiple pass reading and deepening.  Over the years, I believe this is the easiest way to implement for reading a long book.   One of my test beds is poker books because the good ones usually take notoriously amount of time to understand.

My current strategy of reading CLRS split to 3 passes.

Read 1: Browse reading.  Currently at Chapter 12.   In this pass, I would try to go through the material as much as possible.  The goal is to make sure I can keep on reading.   A good book is usually structured in this way.   The bad one will ask you to finish a certain exercise in order to read through.   CLRS is one of those good books you can read through without relying on doing a lot of exercises.  This read usually proceed very quickly.  With my speed, we are talking about 1 chapter/day for simple chapters.  Perhaps 2 days for difficult material such as binary tree or red-black tree.

Read 2: "Exercise" reading.  Current up to P2.1.  In this read, I attempt to finish all exercises for the book.  For algorithmic questions.  I will make sure I implement the solution in C.  Just to keep myself skillful.   This usually gives me the correct answer of a particular question.  This takes some time to finish one exercise.  But I usually learn a lot when I did.

Read 3: "Deep" reading.  This will be the slowest and perhaps impossible to finish in a person's life time.  But just figuring our one topic in one chapter is usually highly though provoking and can keep my mind sharp for a while. In this read, I will use all my imagination, all my curiosity to think of problems which is related to this topic.  They might not have any answers per se.   For example, in the case of insertion sort, I will want to learn all of its technicalities.  All the questions human had asked about the algorithm.  All the variants and all my ideas.  The connections of it with other topics.   This is also the moment where my own thought starts to come up.

Read 3 is the toughest and at this point I only go up to insertion sort of Chapter 2.  All the things I want to think through will be recorded in complementary reading list which I updated constantly.  This is probably the most important read but it's also highly dangerous as well.  Because people who are curious are also easily distracted to other topics.

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