I'll keep it short like that and try to finish those in a month.

I read programming books a bit differently than other books. I can skim through things a bit more, especially depending on how familiar I am with the material. For the Design Patterns book, I'm going to be scanning the patterns so that I'm aware of them and able to look them up later. For Hadoop, I'll be reading it for context and filling in the gaps in knowledge that I've already gleaned from working on an existing Hadoop project. C++ Primer will be easy to skim, at first. I'm only looking for "how to do this in C++". The Unreal Engine book is closely related the C++ book in terms of my goals: I just want to be able to write my next book in C++ in Unreal Engine.