I've gone full memory before and made elaborate mind maps that enable me to sequentially remember the name of each chapter of a book and the sections within each chapter, but you might not need that and more be looking for names of particular equations or people or pieces of code. These can be memorised with inventive memory tricks. (For example, if you were seeing the area of a circle being Pi*r^2 for the first time, you could remember people circling the area of a pyre that's square.)
Then yeah, do the exercises. The exercises aren't about whether you can do them but how fast you can do them. I recommend against skipping exercises.
In terms of which textbooks to study, you might want to ask on stackexchange which skills employers are looking for, or ask any mentors or authority figures or potential future employers, or people hiring within an industry, which skills and knowledges they're looking for.
>>12736488Also this. Don't be like me and get paralysed by trying to do shit perfectly and indefinitely prolonging it. No one's over your shoulder.
>>12737309>My lecturers regularly leave parts of proofs and other remarks as exercises to work on on my own.God lecturers are faggots. (No offence to you if you're gay.) You might want to consider whether being in uni is serving you vs working any kind of job that lets you save, or doing apprenticeships, or getting multiple part time or online jobs and moving to Tajikistan.
Another big piece of advice would be to just find out from employers what they're looking for. Like, Spacex for example won't hire you off a degree. So getting a degree is a complete waste of time from that perspective.
Or if you want to do your own things, ask yourself what you need to do to do those things. Maybe digesting textbooks is helpful. Maybe it's useless.
