I've found that learning a new (programming/scripting) language benefits from solid note taking. I'm very low tech with this: pencil and notebook. Any time I h

I've found that learning a new (programming/scripting) language benefits from solid note taking. I'm very low tech with this: pencil and notebook. Any time I hit something that seems both non-obvious and reasonably important, I write it down. When I make the notes clear and half-way organized, they end up being more useful than the original reference, since they're quicker to read and tailored for what I care about. Early on in learning Objective-C, for example, I was getting caught on one wtf after another, not really grasping it. I decided to take it from the top with my notebook and jot everything interesting down in note form. No kidding, after about ten minutes of this I looked from my notebook to my screen, where source code from an OSS OS X project was sitting, and it was like the climax from The Matrix – I, quite instantly, understood everything. Where once there were blocks of inscrutable code, now I was just reading, and comprehending, a story. So that's great if your brain works like mine. Why is it your notes are so hard to look through?