Effective Studying Method?

[wize1]

I am new to SFML and somewhere between beginner and intermediate c++.
I am using this e-book to explore SFML and become familiar with it's library.
I am curious the opinion of yours on an effective way of studying to become more efficient.
The primary reason I want to ask this question is because I am concerned about time.
Last time I went through a book, it took me a year to finish it. That is far too long. Granted it was my first beginning into c++.
 I would like to finish this book in a month's time or less.

For example, should I write the code manually as the book presents it for the example project?
Or, should I just download the code and open it with visual studio to study what they did?

Thanks in advance for any opinions of how to approach this.

[FRex]

I personally just dove in because I needed to write a game as homework once. I knew Delphi (okay-ish) and C++ Builder (badly) and made few simple shooters in them before moving to VS 2010 (at the time, now I'm on 2017 of course).

[tomvidm]

My experience is that programming books are - in many cases - completely redundant. SFML is really well documented, and the API reference has examples for quite a lot of the classes. There are also a lot of good tutorial, both on the webpage and on the github wiki for SFML.

And don't spend time copying the code in the book. Whenever you write something yourself, you are more involved in the process, and your memory will benefit from it. You may read a section ten times, but writing you own code once or twice may give more insights. Also, writing ready made code robs you of the experience of reading compiler errors. The more errors you make, the more you learn. You might pull out more hairs from your head, but you will be wiser in the end.