Nowadays people mostly learn online. So searching for content is one of the critical skill required.

Say I want to learn about a specific topic: What features does IPV6 has that IPV4 does not.

I need keywords to search. First investigate the first keyword.

My first keyword is the first thing that comes to my mind. For me, it is:

‘ipv6 advantages over ipv4’

I put this (without any quotes) into google search bar.

Then I check “People also search for”. The most frequent and similar keyword to the one that I am seeking for seems to be

“advantages”

I go to advanced google search.

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

My first step is to find articles from reputed universities. They are mostly in the pdf format. And they are located in the sites ending with edu. In my opinion, such articles are usually of great quality. Blogs written by random folks are not very good.

There is a good chance that doing this will lead you to lots of private Indian universities articles. They are mostly garbage. To prevent it I use chrome extension named “uBlacklist”. I have created a filter of unreputed sources, domain suffices etc. You can find them here:

link to my filters

I open the articles in the result of advanced google search simultaneously in multiple tabs. Most university articles are supplemented with lectures in the class. However lectures are not available online. So it will not be enough to just read these articles.

Then I pick one pdf article. Usually the one with more than 20 pages for obvious reasons.

I read inside the pdf and find the keywords for the topic. Academic articles contain keywords that can be found in standard textbooks. I scan through the selected pdf.

https://www.ciara.fiu.edu/pasi/IPv6.PDF

My next goal is to find textbooks that consist of the keywords.

Since I am not attempting to learn entirely about ipv6 practically, my goal is to get more information in short reading. Enough for the exam that I am learning for. This method is tweakable if you want to learn in depth as well.

The keywords to find proper study materials that are found by scanning the pdf are:

• Address Structure – IPv6 Provider prefix, subscriber prefix, subnet prefix

• ipv6 support to mobile devices

These are mostly the highlights from this pdf.

I visit books.google.com

I enter ‘ipv6 support to mobile devices’ in the search bar(without any quotes).

Lots of books will appear. I ignore anything from local Indian authors. I try to find authoritative source. I find something that I would like on a particular book.

“System Administration: Preparing for Network+ Certification” By Jerry K. Ainsworth, Kristine A. Kriegel

I try my luck to find this book in google with this google search query:

filetype:pdf System Administration: Preparing for Network+ Certification

If I do not find the book here, I visit z-lib.fm.

The chances of finding a book in this site is very high. However not always. This time it seems like I had a hard luck.

Now I repeat the steps again. I go back to google books. Find another book. Of course I could do the full text search on z library itself. But I prefer google’s search engine.

This itself is an iterative process. I keep reading, writing what I learnt in notes. All of this is not and should not be done in one sitting. I Prefer pomodoros. Study a topic for ‘n’ minutes, then switch to another activity for the other ‘n’ minutes. I find it extremely productive to keep three different activities. It is not necessary all these three activities are for studying. Some activities could simply be writing a blog post or just writing journal.

Next to youtube. Youtube is very tricky. I have tried my best to filter out stupid youtube channels that are thin in content and mostly rehash/blabber from their notebook. I use extension YTBlock to block such channels.

You can find my filter list here:

ytblock filter

My another technique is to search for videos that are greater than 20 minutes. This filters out all non-academic and spammy type content from youtube. Of course it could have some false positives.

While learning some insanely hard topics, you might need to repeat these steps over and over.

In my opinion, this is not the best way to learn if you have enough time. The better way is to take a (preferably hardcopy) textbook(for computer networks, check the book that I recommend), study it page by page, solve its exercises. You could still follow the techniques mentioned above for researching topics you are confused. But the best way is to internalize the concepts with repetition even when nothing is getting into your head. Keep repeatedly reading it. It will click some day. This process is boring, but works. However I realize not all of the time we can have hardcopy books.

To read pdf books, I recently started using a software called desklamp. The best part is you can take notes side by side. I am pretty sure obsidian users have also found a way to customize it to do the same, but this was more convenient for me.