As noted in other comments, if you build something as you learn the material you'll remember it. My learning strategy is usually: Think up idea No idea how

As noted in other comments, if you build something as you learn the material you'll remember it. My learning strategy is usually: Think up idea No idea how to implement it Look at university lecture notes for background material Read lecture notes, read assigned text Implement idea while I read the text and notes Notice my implementation is poorly inefficient Read more advanced notes/papers to optimize Rewrite idea, success! This is exactly what I did when I read Modern Compiler Implementation in ML by Andrew Appel. This was the course I used http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~janh/courses/411/17/schedule.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~janh/courses/411/17/schedule.html though it was an earlier version. Afterwards I collected a lot of compiler optimization notes, like here https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15745/syllabus.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15745/syllabus.html