How to read an understand the books or papers

Reading books is my hobby. Normally I have few problems when reading science or programming's books. Some books are quite hard to read and understand. The big reason is I don't know the right way to read. Luckily I found an article sharing tips to reading a books. So, I wrote this post to remind me: should follow twelve tips in the article to read books efficiently.

1. Write down EVERY single word that you don't understand. Have to look them all up.

2. Reading the introduction and abstract (if have). The article's author say don't read the abstract, but in my opinion, we should read.

3. Identify the BIG QUESTION, this helps you focus why this research is being done.

4. SUMMARIZE the background in five sentences or less.

5. Identify the SPECIFIC QUESTIONS. What exactly are the authors trying to answer with their research? There maybe multiple questions or just one. Write them down.

6. Identify the approach. What are the authors going to do the answer the SPECIFIC QUESTIONS?

7. Now read the methods section. Draw a diagram for each experiment, showing exactly what the authors did.

8. Read the results section. Write one or more paragraphs to summarize for each experiment, each figure, each table. Don't yet try to decide what the results mean, just write down what they are.

9. Do the results answer the SPECIFIC QUESTIONS? What do you think they mean?

   Don't move on until you have thought about this. In my opinion, I think we have to understand (full or a bit) before go to next section.

10. Read the conclusion/discusstion section.

    What do the authors think the results mean? Do you agree with them? Can you come up with any alternative way?

11. Now, go back to the beginning and read the abstract again.

12. Final step: What do others researchers say about this book?