I tend to read a section carefully, then close the book and try to reproduce the example without looking at it again. Of course I'll allow myself to use online

I tend to read a section carefully, then close the book and try to reproduce the example without looking at it again. Of course I'll allow myself to use online reference material, as I do in real-life programming. If I really get stuck I'll take a look at the book, but just enough to unstuck me. The goal is obviously not to reproduce the example line by line but to reproduce what it does with the same global structure.