[TheAceOfHearts]

This focuses on how to study when you're in school and taking classes. But that likely only represents a small number of years in your life, while the rest will be spent outside of school! IMO, learning how to study when you're outside of school is just as important.

Here's two comments I wish I'd been told earlier:

1. In the context of Computer Science, many books and research papers between the 70s and 90s cover a huge amount of fundamental topics. Newer doesn't always mean better! People were just as smart 30 years years ago as they are today. Even if the context has changed, many aspects likely remain applicable.

2. Many companies publish "white papers" [0] on their technology. These are (sometimes) similar to research papers, expect that they haven't been peer reviewed. They can be a good way to acquire certain kinds of industry knowledge, but be wary of snake oil salesmen. I generally read white papers with the assumption that the source is heavily biased towards whatever perspective is most favorable to them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper

[dhimes]

To your point 1- You are also likely to come across texts that don't do a very good job explaining some fundamental/foundational ideas, perhaps because they were explained so well in the original papers- the ones that your textbook author read- that your textbook author didn't think it was worth spending too much time on it. The original source can be a goldmine in these cases.

This also happens between editions of textbooks by the same author. On an update they leave out stuff to save space or something.

[ams6110]

> be wary of snake oil salesmen

Indeed, and maybe it's just the ones I've read, but it seems to me that most "white papers" are written in the marketing department.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Yup, that's been my experience as well. When I first started noticing their existence I thought they were always marketing propaganda. But you can occasionally find good technical white papers, so it's worth at least being aware of their existence.