Getting rid of some books

I love books. I very rarely get rid of books. I have actually kept the worst books I've read, as a reminder of how poor they were. So, it's unusual for me to get rid of books, but now I'm getting rid of a few. To mark the occasion and remind me of them, I'm semi-reviewing them!

O'Reilly Make There was a point when I'd assume that any O'Reilly book on a subject was the bees' knees. Those were the days when standard utilities weren't documented every which way all over the internet. You might have a man page or info files for the GNU version, but it wasn't particularly approachable. Certainly no Stack Overflow. So, I bought a book on "make". It was mediocre at the time, and useless now.

O'Reilly Lex and Yacc Pretty much the same story.

Java in a Nutshell On the other hand, this was pretty useful. A quick summary of the Java libraries that could be flicked through quickly was great - online docs tended to be long-winded and difficult to search. Unfortunately, this book only goes to Java 1.1. As the language has grown so much, I expect the latest nutshell might not live up to its name.

Unix in a Nutshell Bought somewhat later, this was not so useful. Unix documentation is pretty thorough, and nutshell-like anyway, so this has less value. There are summaries of things like sh, sed and awk, but that's superseded by the O'Reilly shell scripting book I bought more recently.

Progamming Perl This O'Reilly book is generally deemed to be a classic. I never got into it. My review gives the reasons, but basically Perl is just not the way I think, and now that Perl has lost its favoured status, I'm glad to be rid of it.

A Guide to LaTeX (Kopka and Daly) A not great guide to a not great system. Overall, the output of LaTeX is great, but it really does demonstrate what happens if you fail to separate the mark-up from presentation information from the start, and moreover if (at the TeX level) you create a general-purpose programming language without admitting it and making a proper language of it. I just feel the book really reflects the underlying system, rather than being a disaster in itself. If I'm not writing a proper paper, it's Markdown and MathJax for me right now.

Generic Programming and the STL (Austern) Way back when (PhD days, or before?), I wanted to understand the STL, so I chose this book. Bad choice. The subtitle is "Using and Extending the C++ Standard Template Library", and the key word is Extending. This book is much more about the interfaces and contracts provided by the library, rather than normal usage. For example, the actual containers get 70 pages of documentation for 15 classes, in a 500 page book, right at the back. Perhaps good for language lawyering and actually creating STL extension libraries, but not much use to me otherwise.

The Java Tutorial I previously reviewed this book, and, well, I've read it and I don't think it holds much long-term value for me now.

The Nitpicker's Guide for Classic Trekkers This is a detailed episode guide to the original series of Star Trek. However, over time it has become obvious to me that I fundamentally don't care much for the original series.

Roget's English Thesaurus If the internet breaks, synonyms will not be my greatest worry.

Reverse Dictionary Interestingly enough, this is pretty much a synonym for "thesaurus".

The Bloke's Guide to Pregnancy Reviewed here. Not planning to go through that again! In this area, I would recommend "The Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth", followed by "What to Expect - the first year".

Posted 2015-04-28.