[OnionBlender]

I don't get hung up on numbers or whether I actually "finish" the book.

It is a lot easier to read a book like The Pragmatic Programmer cover-to-cover than it is to read a book about a specific language or API. I've been trying to learn Rust and I find that if I don't practice or do exercises then I don't end up remembering what I read. I read nearly all of "Programming Rust" but now I'm having to go back and read many sections because I wasn't writing the code as I was reading the chapters.

As for "finishing" books, I rarely truly finish a book. I've been reading graphics and game engine books but I don't feel pressure to read every chapter. Did I really "finish" a book if I skipped chapters? Who cares. Every graphics/game book seems to start with chapters about linear algebra so I skip those. Collision detection? If I need to find the intersection between a line and a cone then I'll look it up.

I also find it helpful to read a chapter from multiple books about the same topic (thanks to o'reilly books online). Like when I was learning C++11 I read the futures/promises chapter from 4 or 5 different books. I found having the same thing explained by different authors was more helpful than just re-reading a chapter. I also had a learning disability as a kid so maybe that's why I need to re-read things so much.