> Based on a totally unscientific survey (those programming languages that occupy at least 3 feet of shelf space in the McGraw-Hill Bookstore in Manhattan)
Use a bad metric, get bad results.
Who else remembers this era of giant, unhelpful, rapidly-obsoleted books in the computer section of bookstores? Who remembers bookstores? OK, OK, I've been into Waterstones recently, but it never occurred to me to look at computing related books. What use would they be?
1996 was the beginning of the O'Reilly heyday. If you got a book with a white cover with a coloured bar and animal woodcut on it, there was a good chance of it being helpful. Otherwise it was a lottery - there was a cottage industry of people turning out bad books about software filled with screenshots that mostly replicated the online help.
Next level: fill whole pages with output from random Linux commands with 4 verbosity flags set: https://imgur.com/a/rnVE9u4
Spent 45 EUR on this Linux Network Administration handbook by Addison-Wesley Germany as a teenager. Still hurts whenever I think about it.
(Yes, the author also did the screenshot thing: "Look, this is how you configure it using SuSE YaST, and this is how you do it using the Red Hat GUI. Let me show you every single step of the wizard GUI, just to be sure. And this is basically the whole default config file for this daemon, but with "# Created by Bad Tech Writer" prepended. There you go!")
Use a bad metric, get bad results.
Who else remembers this era of giant, unhelpful, rapidly-obsoleted books in the computer section of bookstores? Who remembers bookstores? OK, OK, I've been into Waterstones recently, but it never occurred to me to look at computing related books. What use would they be?
1996 was the beginning of the O'Reilly heyday. If you got a book with a white cover with a coloured bar and animal woodcut on it, there was a good chance of it being helpful. Otherwise it was a lottery - there was a cottage industry of people turning out bad books about software filled with screenshots that mostly replicated the online help.