I'm an Elecronics Engineer and my profile requires me to keep myself updated on most o the technologies and keep learning the new ones.
Now when the new technologies are so varied and so different in aspects of their utility, reading the docs is a priority.
When there is so much to study, with different contexts, and within limited time, then just reading the docs for the sake of it is not sufficient.
The way I developed this "Design Pattern 1" is that you first get the idea of the doc at an abstract level. At an abstract level, you only know the very high level working of the things in the docs and you have very slight idea about the different contexts/nodes in the docs. So you know the graph and connections between these nodes at an abstract level, but you dont know contents of the nodes at this level.
At this time, and at this abstraction, you can relate it to your graphs already stored in your mind/database. The similarities can help you, to a great extent, to get familiar thoroughly with new concepts.
So in this way you keep using your previous knowledge, and at the same time, with very good understanding of the context, you keep updating your database as well. This updated database increases your diversities of the graphs known to you, ans this further helps you in commanding new documents/techniques.
