[mcshicks]

While I've generally been pretty good at picking up things by just doing them I was always a just ok student. Later in life when I wanted to start learning some things outside of work I took the coursera course "learning how to learn" and found it very helpful. It has the strategies above plus others. You can find links to the course as well as books by the instructor on her website - https://barbaraoakley.com/

Specifically though I use different methods for different materials. For some specific things I need to memorize verbatim I use hand written index cards/spaced repetition. For learning math, programming, etc there is no substitute for doing example problems with solutions you can check. For general reading I write my own summaries, notes.