The "Main Learning" book review template
The goal of the “Main Learning” book review is to provide a single, execution-ready concept which the reader of the review can put into action. Different readers will have different notions of what constitutes a main, actionable learning, and that learning could change over time for the same reader. Typically, the reader is myself at some later date.
In other words, the Main Learning does not have to be a complete summary of the book. It’s a personal expression of what the reader found immedieately useful.
The Main Learning book review template consists or four to nine sentences following a set pattern to orient the reader and provide a single, useful takeway:
- Lede: Introduce context.
- Inciting incident: Personal experience to establish rapport with the reader.
- Author’s intent: 1-2 sentence description of what the author intended to achieve.
- Close with main learning, something immediately actionable if possible.
The actionable can be with respect to any part of the book, even from a single page. For example SCQA from Minto’s The Pyramid Principle is explained on pages 22, 23. I’ve had notable success in the past using just SCQA, without any supporting pyramid.
Despite its simple structure, a Main Learning benefits from thoughtfulness. As with any good review, the writer should establish rapport by integrating the book with personal experience, ensure the context is timely and relevant, capture at least some of the author’s intent, and keep it very short, four to nine sentences.
An example follows, with the Main Learning italicized.
Practical Object-oriented Design in Ruby
I’ve never seen a great code base in production, only bad code and worse code. For better or worse, object-oriented programming has dominated my career in prodiction software. While other paradigms such as functional prograaming are growing in popularity, object-oriented code is going to be with us for many, many years into the future, certainly through remainder of my career. Sandi Metz offers Practical Object-oriented Design in Ruby to prograamers in the trade, those working with object-oriented software every day.
Sandi uses a bicycle as an object with which most are familiar, shows how to define classes, and send messages between the classes. She demonstrates refactoring at each step, and thoroughly explains her reasoning.
For me, the single most important thing I would communicate to my current team is the Single Responsibility Principle. All else seems to flow from this principle, and without single responsibility, much of the remaining book seems moot. With single responsibility in hand, the remainder of the book can be fully brought to bear.