This is a late reply to your post but we seem to have similar goals. For REG and AUD, taking notes on the book seemed to be a little easier. The examples were shorter than some of these FAR ones. My goal has been to get through about 50-60 pages with notes for each of these sections but it's taking a lot longer for FAR. 30 pages seems to be about the same pace that I've been able to achieve on an average day. I take intense notes and it might be a little overkill but I almost rewrite the book in a sense. As I get further into the FAR book, I'm beginning to skip more and more examples and instead i'll write the page number in my notes as a reference to the example.
If you have the time I think taking notes while reading the book is the best method. I used this method and got an 84 on REG. However, for AUD, I tried to take a shortcut and wasn't as thorough as I was for REG. I failed AUD the first time. The 2nd time around I ran through the book and took notes on the entire thing. Hopefully this helped me pass.
A couple of days ago I made the decision to stop writing because it was taking too much time, I was feeling burned out, and my hand was fatigued. I started watching the Ninja Plus videos with Bob Monette and I've been typing up notes for those videos. The videos help me a lot. I would recommend watching his videos if you're feeling burned out on reading and taking notes on the book. It might be best to do this every time you notice yourself just sort of copying down what you're reading in your notes as opposed to really understanding what you are writing.
So, for me, the best method has been this… Take complete notes on the book. Then, I go back and take notes on those notes that I took. I only write down things that haven't “stuck” yet in these new notes. Theoretically, if I do this enough times, I would eventually end up with very little to no notes because everything is familiar to me. I'm going to give typing the notes a shot but I know that some say that actual writing is more beneficial. The key thing for me is repetition. So, the quicker I get through the notes, the quicker I can go back through it again and again. I don't think it would be beneficial to get hung up on and spend time copying down an example unless the underlying concepts are already very familiar to you. MCQ concepts flow directly over to SIM concepts. So if you have a solid grasp on the concepts in any of these sections and can do the MCQ questions well, then that knowledge should also help get you through the SIMS. There may be another step such as getting to know how they use or set up certain tables, etc… but knowing the concepts and how and why they got the numbers will make these tables way easier.
To specifically answer your question, even though I haven't taken FAR yet, I think it would be best to read through the table or the example and understand it and then move on to the next. Some of these might take too long to write out to the point that it might conflict with your study schedule. When you go back to review that section at a later date it'll look more familiar to you and should make more sense.
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