How do y'all read programming books? Do you try to memorize them, redo all the examples on your machine or read them quickly just to pick up the most important points and to remember where to look if additional informations are needed in future?

Nowadays I always use the last strategy otherwise reading a single book would take me a year but I'm curious to know if I'm the only one.

Keep googling and debugging until it works. There you go.

For me reading a book when I don’t know anything about the subject is a waste of time.
Reading a book after having used the related technology for a substantial amount of time helps me fill in the cracks in areas where I may have been lacking some understanding

Classical paper books are too static for the rapidly evolving world of development, even if you are not in the web stack with its ridiculous amount of new frameworks.

But if you mean digital books (not pdf, though), I read them to fill the gaps after I have familiarized myself with the topic, like @black-kite said.

It's impossible to memorize them. I don't think anyone but savants ever did that.

The best thing about a facts book is that it would be a curated collection of what you should know, so you could skim it and get an idea of the scope of concepts within the topic.

Allthough personally reading code in books always sucked for me compared to online tutorials where I could copy, past and mess around

Books are for reference.

I like Kindle for that.

Especially in Infra... A good book is better than 99 % of the crap you find online.

@Lensflare Nowadays I rarely study frameworks but aim at more fundamental stuff like system programming, algorithms, methodologies, design patterns, stuff which doesn't change frequently.

Recently re-read a programming book on design patterns; and I mainly used it as a reference to look stuff up online. skimmed chapters to recall some terms (kind of realised we use some patterns without mentioning them by name). I highlighted some well phrased quotes and explanations. But when it came down to detailed code examples (like 5 page example of how to rewrite code into a different pattern) I felt like the book format didn't work for me and I start looking at online articles instead

Really depends on the book. Sometimes is makes sense to just read through it all, some parts skimming some parts thoroughly. Some books are a nice ref but usually an electronic version is a better ref as it's easier to search through and as texts outdate easily I tend to use the official documentation way more than books.
So books that I do keep around have value because they explain things (concepts) very well and are structured well enough so I can look things up if I'm not sure anymore.