Hi Tia,
I began by previewing the smaller books first, spending about 5-8 minutes previewing each of them and gathering trigger words. The great thing about the syntopic reading in such a tightly focused area was that I could grab a number of trigger words/phrases easily from the smaller books so that when I went to the 1,000 page book I already had a number of words that were relevant to it. The structure of the C++ language and order of presented concepts was similar in the books (which would also occur when syntopically reading physics books, for example) - so it also took only about 5 or 10 minutes to preview that book, too.
When I preview, I tend to look at the front cover and back cover - grabbing and noting anything of interest there. I then move to the table of contents and grab stuff if there's anything there. Jump to the index and quickly scan it for anything that has a lot of entries associated with it, then move through the main body of the text, grabbing anything that catches my attention. I then decide look over my list of words/phrases and create a strong purpose statement. I hope you find this useful.
