“Carefully working through” is much different than “reading”.
Most of the time spent “carefully working through” is spent solving problems—both the ones inline in the text, and additional ones that you spontaneously think of when doing that kind of work.
Indeed. Just reading The Art of Computer Programming would be a pointless task. Incidentally, this wisdom is so obvious in academia that when people say “I read X” they really mean something like “I took notes and worked out most of the exercises”. When they want to convey that they just read the text, they say “I looked at X”. This language definitely misled me when I was an undergrad.
“Carefully working through” is much different than “reading”.
Most of the time spent “carefully working through” is spent solving problems—both the ones inline in the text, and additional ones that you spontaneously think of when doing that kind of work.
Indeed. Just reading The Art of Computer Programming would be a pointless task. Incidentally, this wisdom is so obvious in academia that when people say “I read X” they really mean something like “I took notes and worked out most of the exercises”. When they want to convey that they just read the text, they say “I looked at X”. This language definitely misled me when I was an undergrad.