Why Learn to Read Papers?
Reading papers certainly builds character because It often takes many hours and there is no guarantee you walk away with the whole story. This is not to disparage you, but merely to be open and transparent. Reading papers is difficult, there are no two ways about it. Advances in fields such as machine learning, deep learning, data science, databases, and data engineering often come in the form of academic research, whose language is that of academic papers. Think about some of the techniques you might use: Convolutional Neural Networks, PCA, and AdaBoost (even Deep Boosting!). These all came out of research, and yes they all have papers. Also, consider that there are many papers on the application and use of these techniques and when you are trying to solve a specific problem, these papers can be critical. Beyond staying current with research it is also worth traveling to the past and giving older papers a read. You will learn so much.
