Technology changes so quickly - for a career in IT you will learn stuff that will be obsolete in 5 years. You will learn stuff you will never use and you will come across stuff in your job that you can't find any documentation or books to help with. You have to be able to get through vast amounts of information quickly.

I have read so many of those 2-inch thick computer books in my time. But reading those books cover to cover is not an option. They are not novels and there just isn't time. I now have a standard method of going through them.

1) Skimming the whole book in a couple of 2-hour sessions. Reading the contents pages - ignore the introduction/acknowledgements - then in each chapter just the main headings - take in the diagrams and any code - don't stop to actually read the text of the book - just get an overview of the whole thing. Go as fast as you can, but turn every page and read headings diagrams and code. (Rest afterwards its exhausting)

Then I have an idea of the scope of the whole book.

2) Run through each chapter in a 1-hour session just to refresh - this time a little more in-depth - perhaps reading lists, tables, any highlighted or italic text, perhaps a few sentences that take your interest - but again don't slow up by actually reading the text in sequence.

3) Now go to your computer and start doing the examples and running the code from the chapter you just went through - if you get lost or don't understand the code - now is the time to go back to the text and get clarification, or Google if that doesn't help.

4) Do the questions on that chapter and if you get them wrong work out why. The Microsoft books tend to have simplistic examples, but the questions can be tricky - use Google - its quicker than searching pages in the book

Repeat 2 to 4 for all chapters.

Using this method you might actually read 25% of the words in the book - but you should have some knowledge of everything it covers, have read all the code and tried out a good deal of it - and done all the questions.

If you get stuck you can post more specific questions here.