G'day mate
When you give your unconscious mind constant exposure to the books with example code, constructs etc, you are increasing the neural network in your brain to make it easier to learn and make associations when you activate.
Activation then becomes easier because you have increased resonance with the code because your subconscious has seen it.
I would photoread the books daily for a few weeks and activate by practicing the problems in the book.
However, from my experience, when learning to programme, it is important to have a tangible and worthwhile purpose. The reason I am saying that is because if you are learning code for the sake of learning code, it is harder to make the associations. However if you create your code in the context of real-world scenarios, for instance code the interacts with a business application, then you are focusing your energy on building real in-demand skills while you are also learning.
The secret is to focus your enery on building skills that are in-demand because it is crazy to be learning languages that employers rarely want. If you look at todays market, .NET, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, there are hundreds of jobs for these kind of developers.
Therefore if you have a vision of the kind of applications you would like to build, know the languages that employers are crying out for, then this would give you a powerful purpose and motivation which will make learning the skills much easier for you - because in this case you have a specific outcome.
Photoreading can be an essential tool in this process. Because if you master the techniques (I am still learning the system myself) this will give you a competative edge when keeping your skill levels up to date. As you know, new versions of software emerge all the time. If you are a master of photoreading, then you can keep up to date easily and take less time to get what you need from books.
Let me know what kind of feedback you receive because I am on a similar path to yourself and it would be good to share knowlege.
Kindest Regards
dmlocke
