To comprehend and remember more, make personal notes you can revisit. For digital readers, highlight

6 min readDec 5, 2020

In the above function, I used .rename method to rename the lng column to lon. In the original, dirty function, a new column was created and the old one was dropped which was unnecessary.

Comprehension and knowledge application is more important to me now than ever before. Without understanding and the ability to remember what I read, reading will be a waste of my time.

The first sentence should contain the purpose of the function, like a topic sentence in an essay. It should start right after opening the triple quotes. Optional explanations should be given as separate, unindented paragraphs:

If you aim to read 100 books a year, the important question you should be asking yourself is: If I speed-read and hit my goal, can I still recall and apply greater percentage what I’m reading in the future?
5. Don’t let it slip to the dermatologist who is treating your bite that you are going on a swimming trip to Lake Tahoe next week after she just explicitly told you not to put your bite in lake water.
Now, you might be thinking: ‘I never had to spend more than 2–3 minutes if my code generates an error. I could always solve them with simple print statements and playing around…’ That’s a classic rookie misunderstanding.

Reading upgrades my mental models and informs my ideas as a writer. ― Stephen King once said, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner and a billionaire himself, once noted: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

“Read to understand, read to connect, and read to imagine. Books really are magical, and I do wish more of us would spend time with them. But let’s not pretend that treating them as a ticket to success will make you successful,” writes Zat Rana.

If you pay attention, the main purpose of the function is done in a single line (right after the second comment). The other lines are performing cleaning tasks that are not very clear.

In the above function, I used .rename method to rename the lng column to lon. In the original, dirty function, a new column was created and the old one was dropped which was unnecessary.

5. Don’t let it slip to the dermatologist who is treating your bite that you are going on a swimming trip to Lake Tahoe next week after she just explicitly told you not to put your bite in lake water.

If you are interested in boosting your career, earning more money, accumulating wisdom, or improving your life skill, developing a reading habit is a crucial task. You will learn so much from others.Making reading a habit can take time — aiming to absorb a lot of wisdom from all the books you read is even more difficult, but it pays a lifetime if you get the reading strategy right.First of all, the docstring does not give a good description of the function. If we spend some time reading the code, we will realize that its main purpose is to read a csv file from path argument and subset it using country argument and return top 25 most populated cities of that country.

A common mistake many beginners make is writing too long and complicated functions. It is always recommended to design functions to only perform one specific task. Small and precise functions are easy to test and debug with modern IDEs and will be flexible.

If you still think like that, try to write a script/program that actually works with at least 200 lines long, and then we will talk. In the meantime, consider this function:

When I first started learning Python, I also thought the books and courses I took made a very big deal of bugs in code. Because then, the code I wrote was not sophisticated enough to generate giant pain in the a** bugs or errors.

Active reading on the other hand happens through engagement, repetition, making notes and revisiting the most useful books. It’s how you transfer new knowledge from your working memory to your long-term understanding.

Reading is one of the best ways to learn what others have already figured out. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one,” says George R.R. Martin

To comprehend and remember more, make personal notes you can revisit. For digital readers, highlight

Written by Pramod Bhanuka Bandara Rajapaksa

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