34
votes

What's the worst programming-related or technical book you've ever read? This can be any book which one way or another can be connected to programming, as long as it's not fiction.

4
  • 10
    I was browsing my library, but I wasn't able to find it... Probably because I throwed it into the trash... I can't even remember the title, but that was about COM+
    – user2567
    Sep 24, 2010 at 9:44
  • 2
    Fictional as in the book doesn't exist? Or fictional as in a fiction book?
    – Joe D
    Sep 24, 2010 at 16:05
  • @Joe D: Sorry, I meant 'fiction book'. I'll change the question accordingly.
    – gablin
    Sep 24, 2010 at 21:21
  • 1
    and where is the reopen btn?
    – mlvljr
    Nov 11, 2010 at 0:59

28 Answers 28

31
votes

Any book that allows you to teach yourself X in Y hours.

I've read some in the past but once read you don't know any details whatsoever about X and you can't use the book as a reference for X either. After discovering that it seems better to go for the big books.

6
  • 3
    THIS. The only SAMS book I bought that "teaches me" VB.NET in 21 days was so ridiculously out of sync with reality that I literally threw it away.
    – Jonn
    Sep 24, 2010 at 15:21
  • 1
    I may get shouted down on this but I think as a corollary, the "C for Dummies" books were actually pretty good for what they were trying to do. The guy who wrote them invented the "for Dummies" concept (and sold it), so he was a pretty adept technical writer. They might not hold up so well now if I go re-read them but they did stand out to me at the time as a good exception to the "___ for Dummies"/"___ in ___ hours/days" being crap rule.
    – Tom Kidd
    Sep 24, 2010 at 15:54
  • 7
    To me, the "for Dummies" books are great for what they are -- a compact (if less detailed) explanation of a complex concept, geared toward people that don't already know much about it. They'd probably suck as the only reference, but they go a long way toward helping someone who's new to the concept wrap their minds around it, without oversimplifying to the point of being wrong. That's more than i can say for a lot of other books.
    – cHao
    Sep 27, 2010 at 18:41
  • I think the biggest problem with some of these books is the title. If you change it to "A Brief Introduction to X" you'd have a better picture of what you're getting. I agree they aren't good for the details or as a reference you'll keep coming back to, but that's not really what they're intended for. Oct 16, 2010 at 20:46
  • Perhaps they are referring to "Venus-days" - they are much longer than Earth-days.
    – user1249
    Jan 30, 2011 at 17:02
26
votes

Hardcore Java

alt Hardcore Java

This book was written by a person that truly did not understand the finer points of java. He didn't even understand by ref or by val parameter passing. I'll quote the top rated amazon review: (it's a 1 star)

In the preface, the author states that the goal of this book is to transform a developer from the intermediate level to a true guru. In the back cover it even promises that "you'll master the art of writing error-prone (sic!) code", and the reference to "error-prone code" sadly finds its confirmation once one starts reading.

It takes about two chapters to demolish the author's credibility as a guru, and you will be reading the rest of the book with a skeptical eye, doubting every assertion that looks questionable and suspecting that the author is talking well above his level of competence, and patronizing about it too!

The first chapters are an atrocious review of some Java concepts, densely packed with serious mistakes, not typos, mistakes (plenty of typos too).

As an example, on page 9 the definition of the `for' statement is wrong, a simple check of the Java Language Specification would have spared the author some embarrassment.

On page 15 the author gives us wrong rules for labels in Java, and in the same page he confuses the logic of the 'break' and 'continue' statements, providing also a logically wrong code example, just to screw-up things even better.

I would not know how to describe the section on "Chained deferred initialization" on page 53, "raving" maybe. This one is cited in the errata page at oreilly.com, and the "author regrets that it slipped through the proverbial cracks". I am more concerned that something like that has been actually written (complete with code samples!), than that it has passed unscathed through editing and reviewing. Let's hope it was written by somebody else playing with the author's laptop. Somebody who does not know what JVM means.

There are also less severe but equally confidence-abating points, like, on page 25, the form:

new String("A button to show" + text);

which we should not find in books for guru wannabes.

The author is probably a productive software architect, some points, later in the book, are interesting, though nothing could be defined advanced, but he does not know Java better than an average developer, and this book does not add very much to an intermediate level, apart, maybe, from a warning about writing books: writing a book can transform you from a good developer into a bad author.

It is sad that we are flooded with such mediocre and unprofessional "error-prone"publications from such once reputable publishers, from time to time I still re-read and enjoy the conciseness, clarity and value of classics like K&R's "The C Programming Language" and I wonder why today's output is so vastly inferior.

As one of the few exceptions, I strongly recommend Bloch's "Effective Java" (Addison-Wesley) which is truly a book written by a guru. After reading that one, "Hardcore Java" will seem even emptier.

Its errata on O'Reilly is (last time I checked) 20+ pages long.

edit: just checked it, default settings in word, it's 23 pages long.

7
  • I have an O'Reilly rant building up. I wonder where it is going to blow. It needs more data, first.
    – Mark C
    Oct 15, 2010 at 9:23
  • 1
    If you notice, the current page for the book says there's no errata for the book. You have to dig it out.
    – Malfist
    Oct 15, 2010 at 13:26
  • Are you serious?! And that is not a newer edition?
    – Mark C
    Oct 15, 2010 at 13:40
  • (I haven't seen the book.) To summarize the reviews at Amazon, I'd suggest a book title of "From C to Java: How to apply your hard-earned credentials to a new language and become an instant expurt(sic)"
    – rwong
    Oct 16, 2010 at 6:09
  • 4
    O'Reilly books are very poorly edited... I am not impressed with them as a publishing company.
    – snmcdonald
    Oct 25, 2010 at 1:59
14
votes

I still remember how bad this book was:

Oracle9i: A Beginner's Guide

Oracle9i: A Beginner's Guide

I was angry reading through it. I'll quote from my Amazon review:

Almost immediately, I was disappointed: Chapter 1 is a tribute to how amazing Oracle is and how godlike Larry Ellison is and it's filled with pages and pages of revenues and sales. What a waste of paper. Then Chapter 2 tells me how to use newsgroups and Google: more wasted paper. I come to Chapter 3 and I think I finally get into learning something. Then I notice they concentrate on Sun Solaris as the operating system which isn't very helpful to a person trying to learn this on his own at home.

Then on page 84 I read, "In earlier releases of the Beginner's Guide, we walked you through the Oracle server installation. With Oracle 8i and now 9i, it's too big a topic to cover in a book this size." That's how they start out their step-by-step walkthrough of setting up your first Oracle database. Oh, the last step reads, "12. Read the rest of this book." To me, the book wasted 80 pages then tells me installation would take too long. Very disappointing.

3
  • 3
    sounds like a waste of paper!
    – Matt Ellen
    Sep 24, 2010 at 10:37
  • 1
    You don't run Solaris at home? I did during that window of time when it was free... Sep 27, 2010 at 17:47
  • 4
    Wow. Sounds like an amazing book.
    – Vetle
    Oct 4, 2010 at 20:14
13
votes
  1. Let Us C - Yashavant P. Kanetkar

  2. Object Oriented Programmig with C++ - E Balagurusamy

5
  • 3
    +1 for the swcond one. This book is not known outside India at all, but is quite famous in universities in south india. Perhsps the fact that the author was the vice chancellor of a university helped this fame. The contents are more like it was written by someone who just completed a semester in C++.
    – Nivas
    Oct 15, 2010 at 7:29
  • 1
    @Nivas : Yeah ! Both Bala and Kanetkar's books are crap still most of the students in Indian universities are referring that book. Oct 15, 2010 at 16:43
  • 2
    I would upvote this more times if I could. Both Bala and Kanetkar have destroyed many many young minds. Oct 16, 2010 at 9:43
  • @Anna I C. (C++ to be specific.) Sep 15, 2011 at 4:18
  • I wish I could give you +100 for this, I see people who swear by these book all the time and then reading the code they write makes cry.
    – nikhil
    Jun 6, 2012 at 17:13
13
votes

Worst. Book. Ever.

It's the size of a phone book, and it's laid out like a sort of recipe book. It's basically a massive collection of thousands of code snippets for accomplishing various tasks, taken completely out of context and often wrong or broken or dated.

The only thing more hilarious is their follow-up book, Jamsa's C/C++/C# Programmers Bible. Because those languages are totally interchangeable, right?

Would you buy a book on programming from this man?

6
  • 4
    +1 for C/C++/C#. Actually, I'd like to do a +1 for C/C++ as well. Oct 17, 2010 at 12:52
  • 1
    +1 for mentioning C++/C# interchaneability... I use C++ codez in my C# all the time. Dec 29, 2010 at 3:31
  • 3
    What's next... C/C++/C#/Java? Or Perl/Python/C++/Ruby/Java/VHDL/Prolog? Sep 15, 2011 at 4:19
  • I used that book in college. Or, at least I bought it, it was was too big to carry around.
    – CaffGeek
    Jan 9, 2012 at 14:21
  • Looks like the author setup his own publishing company, published his book, and then distributed it to 70 countries in 28 languages. Jun 21, 2012 at 5:26
11
votes

The worst book I ever read was Ingegneria del codice by McConnell Steve.

alt text

Yes, it is the Italian translation of the best book I ever read: Code Complete. But the translation was so bad that I had to buy the original version. It has been the last translated technical book I bought. Since then, I only read technical books in English.

20
  • 28
    +1, translations (in any languages) ar almost always bad.
    – MAK
    Sep 24, 2010 at 14:05
  • 7
    +1 Oh yes translations. French is my native language, and I had to buy original books a couple of time. Now I buy the original version and no more translations.
    – user2567
    Sep 24, 2010 at 14:17
  • 5
    @gablin: I'm pretty sure he means "Are there any programming books worth reading in any language other than English?" Sep 27, 2010 at 20:27
  • 2
    @Mark C: are you on extacy or something like that ;) ;) ? 6 big comments in 30 minutes. Why not asking a question instead ?
    – user2567
    Oct 15, 2010 at 9:15
  • 3
    @Mark C, easy now. The basic problem is that a translator needs to be very well technically founded to be able to understand what to translate, and orally well founded to be able to express it fluently in another language. I believe editors have simply underestimated this.
    – user1249
    Nov 28, 2010 at 2:46
10
votes

This book was our reading list for a module on C++ in college.

It seemed to be a kinda of 2 for 1 purchase so we wouldn't have to buy a UML book.

The book's huge size combined with no flow and an obsession with ants is why it get my vote.

alt text

I think it may be in the running for the worst cover on a computer book.

12
  • 11
    Kinda messed up how a book about programming loves its bugs so...
    – cHao
    Sep 24, 2010 at 16:56
  • 6
    @cHao: Well, it is a C++ book... Sep 27, 2010 at 16:20
  • I had to read this one for my uni course too... it's pretty dry, and hard to follow in places, but it's been written deliberately so that you have to have a tutor to guide you through it!
    – Steve Hill
    Oct 15, 2010 at 15:12
  • 3
    That's the most amazing cover I've ever seen! Sep 15, 2011 at 4:16
  • 1
    And the emphasis on Web programming? WTF? Who the heck uses C++ for that? Oct 10, 2011 at 0:40
9
votes

Pro PHP Security

Pro PHP Security by Snyder & Southwell for Apress.

Whilst I've met a lot of webdev books and tutorials with an extremely poor attitude to security (hence this cry for help), this book reaches new depths by having code packed full of security holes in a book that is supposed to be all about security.

I never read it in full, with loads of chapters barely touching on PHP, but even a cursory flick through revealed HTML-injections (XSS) in almost every example, even in the chapter about how to avoid XSS attacks. There's SQL-injection. There's directory traversal. This is in the ‘how to do it’ examples, not the ‘here's a common mistake to avoid’ bit! There are even (inadequate) suggestions on how to ‘safely’ use eval and system, which could much more sensibly be replaced by the word ‘DON'T’.

What solutions it does offer are largely wrong-headed and discredited approaches based on ‘sanitising’ or randomly escaping at the input stage, instead of really understanding how text escaping works and how you need to do the right kind of encoding as and when output in a particular format is required. This misunderstanding is a widespread cause of broken apps and it is heartbreaking to see it in a ‘security’ book. And then there are the totally bizarre recommendations like adding an ‘admin lock’ column to all your tables to try to enforce access logic. Whut? Oh, and the code's a mess of mixed-up logic and markup, natch.

4 stars at Amazon! Buy your copy now!

3
  • You seem to have an attraction to bad programming books! Speaking of which, do you own a copy of Hardcore Java?
    – Mark C
    Oct 15, 2010 at 8:13
  • 1
    It does sound wonderful! I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
    – bobince
    Oct 15, 2010 at 23:11
  • Yikes. I'll have to find a copy of this just out of morbid curiosity. Oct 10, 2011 at 2:43
8
votes

I've come across lots of bad programming books, but those have always been ones that I just happened to come accross (e.g. in a bookstore, at a friend's place etc.). The only really bad book that I have ever bought and tried to follow that turned out to be utter garbage was Java 2: The Complete Reference by Herb Schild. The TA actually recommended that book.

alt text

I spent the whole semester wondering why that book was filled with irrelevance (that book isn't sure whether it is a tutorial or a reference IMHO). I know of some people who have liked it and claim they derived some benefit from it, but I just ditched the book near the end of the semester and focused on the class notes. Later on I found better books on Java, and really learnt the language.

Edit: Someone actually "borrowed" the book from me after some years, and failed to return it. So, I guess a least one person liked it.

10
  • 8
    Herb Schild: that explains a lot. He has a long history of poor (to put it nicely) C and C++ books.
    – Richard
    Sep 24, 2010 at 17:07
  • 1
    I've got that one. I didn't think it was bad, but I didn't think it was especially good either. I got what I needed out of it. Sep 27, 2010 at 17:49
  • 2
    Someone once said "If you want to before a java guru, this is the book for you". Some professor once remarked "This is an advanced book. Read it after knowing the basics of Java". The "Complete Reference" tag has a great influence on college goers and professors in India.
    – Nivas
    Oct 15, 2010 at 7:25
  • 1
    @MAK I completely agree. I had a copy, and I became no Java guru with this book. What I meant was this book is considered a great one in some universities here. I and thats bad news because thats where people start learning these stuff, and whatever book the professor suggests is considered good. I myself don't like this book.
    – Nivas
    Oct 15, 2010 at 9:01
  • 3
    Anything by Schildt is on my avoid list, and not just because Peter Seebach ripped him to shreds on his first book on C. +1 for this.
    – user131
    Oct 15, 2010 at 12:54
8
votes
  1. Anything and everything written by Herbert Schildt. Calling this one book is probably a bit of a stretch -- it's more like an eternal case of food poisoning committed to paper.

  2. Fractal Programming in C, by Roger T. Stevens. As Leonard Plinth-Garnell would have said, "Exquisitely awful!"

  3. Numeric Recipes in [C | C++]. Lots of "recipes", but 1) the code is really Fortran with C-family syntax, and 2) many (most?) of the algorithms is propounds are numerically unstable and generally best avoided.

1
  • Sadly, the style of Numerical Recipes is quite popular with many non-programmers, at least with my (physics) professors. Dec 13, 2011 at 16:05
7
votes

Please forgive me... I was in college and was fascinated with Y2K. The book proved to be boring and like the hype, was all sensationalism. Complete garbage.

Time Bomb 2000

6
  • 2
    Y2K was the most sensationalism which I ever see on programming. It was a real, but not that much.
    – Maniero
    Sep 24, 2010 at 16:54
  • 3
    Yes but there was a method to the madness, IT shops found it a great way to get new equipment and people to fix some long-standing issues nobody wanted to pay for fixing before. Ther was lot of work charged to Y2K that had nothing to do with it but did have to do with the fact that it was easy to get money if you cried, Y2K.
    – HLGEM
    Sep 24, 2010 at 19:40
  • 1
    I've already got my copy of "Time Bomb 2038" reserved. I just have to bank on UPS or whoever delivers it will have already switched to 64-bit systems by then.
    – Workman
    Dec 18, 2010 at 3:10
  • 1
    +1 for asking for forgiveness. However I think we both know you won't ever be forgiven for buying this. Dec 29, 2010 at 3:31
  • The interesting thing is that Ed Yourdon is an otherwise reasonable, well-respected author, or so I understand. He just made a colossal blunder with his estimation of the impact here. Oct 10, 2011 at 2:44
6
votes

alt textalt text

If you find this crap in a tester's cubicle--immediately fire him/her. This book is for imbeciles written by an imbecile.

3
  • 3
    What's wrong with it? Sep 24, 2010 at 14:01
  • 5
    Everything. It teaches nothing, 0. The whole "book" is just a dumb list of outdated software and (very) naive paraphrasing of software QA terms. If a person finds something interesting in this "book" then such person cannot be in software development/testing. Sep 24, 2010 at 15:11
  • 2
    What if I find it nailed to the wall of the tester's cubicle with a dagger?...
    – mjfgates
    Jun 21, 2012 at 9:32
6
votes

Oh, and, well, controversially, this, I guess:

Stroustrup 3rd ed

Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language, third edition. It's not the worst programming book I've ever read by a long chalk, but it's certainly the most disappointing.

I remember liking the second edition, which was, at least, an attempt at writing in the same terse style as K&R's C masterpiece. Sadly, that edition predates templates and other features of the modern language, so isn't much use today.

The third edition jettisons any attempt at that terseness, ending up with a book three times as long as its predecessor, filling up its pages with endless tedious discussions of the author's ideas of best practices for object-oriented coding and software development in general.

Somewhere in between all the rambling there's a description of how the C++ language works, but good luck finding it. It's a sprawling mess of a book.

(Much like the language, eh?) (Sorry, that was uncalled for.) (Well maybe a bit called for.)

6
  • I own a Swedish translation of this book (but I don't think it's of the third edition). Now I don't know if Bjarne wrote in such a manner, but the translation is horrendous: I find it absolutely impossible to read. You're looking in a dictionary half of the time and trying to figure out what exactly is meant by a particular sentence. I must look in an English edition when I get the chance...
    – gablin
    Sep 24, 2010 at 21:20
  • Oh dear! The English version's not so bad, prose-wise. The flights into Bjarne's Philosophy Of Software Engineering are a tiresome read though, and probably not much fun to translate.
    – bobince
    Sep 24, 2010 at 21:58
  • Glad I never "upgraded" then! Second edition is still the most current one sitting on my shelf at home. :-) Sep 27, 2010 at 17:50
  • 7
    I actually read it cover-to-cover in school and thought it was a decent read. Am I the only one who likes this book?
    – Doug T.
    Oct 15, 2010 at 15:54
  • I had to read it three times before I grasped the concepts it was trying to explain. Only programming book I ever read that didn't stick after the second read. Oct 16, 2010 at 13:52
6
votes

It has to be "Wicked Cool PHP"

I bought it because it had a robot with a hammer on the front cover,what could go wrong? I thought. Turns out everything. Pointless examples, terrible code and incorrect security information throughout.

alt text

3
  • 3
    I bet you never buy another book with a robot and hammer on the cover! Nov 15, 2010 at 1:50
  • 4
    You would think that Kirk...
    – Toby
    Nov 15, 2010 at 20:26
  • robot look nice :[+_+]:
    – c69
    Apr 7, 2012 at 13:54
5
votes

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET

The shame was that I love DDD, love the ideas presented in the book and the author is intelligent and knowledgeable; but I've tried reading this book through maybe 5-10 times now and just can't do it. The author needs to know when to stop talk, stop going on tangents, stop providing 'did you know' or 'story about this paragraph' sections on damn near every single page and stop trying to name drop on every paragraph.

Bottom line: The book's got some good information/ideas, except that they're buried in so much BS, that you'll never get to them. This book could have been 1/4 its content, and it would have been good.

3
  • Funny, I really liked that book. I thought the tangents were helpful. Sep 24, 2010 at 15:49
  • 1
    I agree with SnOrfus. This one seems like it should be great, but it reads like a stream-of-consciousness rant. Sometimes I'm in the mood for it, but in general I prefer a little more structure in a book. Sep 27, 2010 at 13:50
  • I used to really like this book, until I understood that in DDD having a "IsValid" or similar method/property on an aggregate root is a bit of an anti-pattern in DDD.
    – FinnNk
    May 3, 2011 at 7:50
5
votes

Head First C#. Shame to the Head First family IMO.

alt text

2
  • 8
    can you elaborate why you think this?
    – RodH257
    Nov 6, 2010 at 2:19
  • I have always thought that head first books are quite good, they target beginners and almost always deliver. But I haven't read this one.
    – nikhil
    Jun 6, 2012 at 17:15
4
votes

UML in a NutShell (1st edition).

UML In a NutShell

Essentially unreadable, needed reviewers to tell the author to start again with some explanation, not just a summary of the standards.

The 2nd edition, on the other hand, is readable and useful.

6
  • 18
    But the cat is cute!
    – Wizard79
    Sep 24, 2010 at 15:16
  • I was going to add this, but I see you beat me to it.
    – RichardOD
    Sep 24, 2010 at 15:32
  • 8
    @Lorenzo: The topic of cats' attempt to take over society by appearing cute is off topic.
    – Richard
    Sep 24, 2010 at 17:06
  • 1
    I own 'Algorithms In a Nutshell'. The O'Reilly Errata section has over 50 entries last time I checked. The samples are horrible and most of them are wrong. The book fails to cover a few basic algorithms let a long complete them. 'In a Nutshell' is a horrible series.
    – snmcdonald
    Nov 15, 2010 at 1:03
  • Nutshell is wildly variable. SQL in a Nutshell isn't bad... far from complete or definitive, but did a good job of covering the major syntax differences in the DBMSs it covered.
    – bobince
    Aug 18, 2011 at 20:49
4
votes

How to do everything with PHP and MySQL by Vikram Vaswani. That book set me back so much when learning programming at first. Horrible code, constant mixing and matching of code and markup, complete ignorance of OOP the barest nod to security throughout and just plain ignoring PHP5, which even then, wasn't exactly brand new.

I wrote a blog post on programming books in which I had this picture comparing the two first PHP books I got.

Compare the size http://blog.webicity.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/books-small.jpg

Guess which has the more accurate title?

3
votes

I don't remember the title, but I recently saw a high school text book for Visual Basic. The first two chapters were not about coding or even VB related (A history of BASIC would have been an improvement.).

The school could have saved a lot of money by just Googling 'VB Hello World'.

2
votes

Programming in C++ by Dewhurst and Stark:

Programming in C++

It may not have been the worst ever. It makes my list because the first edition cover looked exactly like K&R's The C Programming Language, so I was expecting a work of similar quality. I got a copy 20 years ago, just as C++ was starting to get widespread notice. This book taught the syntax, but it did nothing to show a C programmer how to take advantage of C++'s features. I found it a very frustrating book.

1
  • Ah yes, the classic bait-and-switch judge-by-the-cover ruse!
    – Mark C
    Oct 15, 2010 at 8:14
2
votes

Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion - Easily in the bottom rung among all the Pragmatic Programmer books I've read till now. Extremely thin on content. Some might argue that this book is for absolute beginners who are starting out with version control, but that's rubbish - whatever the book has, is not actually worth writing a book for.

12
  • 3
    Agreed. The free online Subversion book (svnbook.red-bean.com) is much better. Also, the index in Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion is useless for finding what you want.
    – Dan Dyer
    Oct 2, 2010 at 15:59
  • I got this book in the pragmatic starter kit when I knew zilch about subversion (and really version control in general). It helped my a lot. Woulda been loads better if they used tortoise though. As if anyone uses the commandline for subversion anymore. Oct 16, 2010 at 6:31
  • @Snorfus - good that it helped you. I just found it too simplistic. CLI for SVN - some Linux users do :)
    – talonx
    Oct 16, 2010 at 7:57
  • 1
    @SnOrfus: I use command line svn all the time -- both on the linux servers, and locally on my Mac. I have a svn GUI (Versions) which is great for browsing, looking at logs, blame, etc, but I find it faster to pick out specific subsets of files to commit, or look at logs for specific date ranges, via the command line.
    – Michael H.
    Oct 16, 2010 at 18:34
  • @snorfus If I used svn (which I don't because I hate it), I would use command line. Not everyone uses Windows, you know. Oct 17, 2010 at 12:48
1
vote

I can't remember the name - later I might see if I can dig it out - but there was an ASP.NET book I had that had all the code snippets (and there were a lot) as Visual Studio screenshots. It seemed cool at first because it showed me exactly where to go in the IDE (I was just learning at that point). After a while though (Chapter 2, I think), I found I knew where everything was and I was just finding the shots too difficult to read.

Pro C# by Andrew Troelsen was mostly very good, but someone needs to teach the man to use examples properly. He'd teach one technique for a topic (let's say multithreading), then teach another and compare the two. The problem is that rather than simply updating the first sample with the new code, he'd write a totally new application that does something totally different, and throw a bunch of extra concepts into the mix as well.

1
vote

A Computer Science Tapestry: Exploring Computer Science in C++

This was assigned reading when I was in college. Apart from being totally soporific, this book presents things in such a convoluted way, I doubt I could have parsed it without prior programming knowledge: most of my class, in which there was only one experienced coder beside myself, was completely lost.

I gave up after reading only a fraction of the book and tried using it to hold up the end of a wobbly bookcase. It wasn't great at that, either: a little too thick and the cover was slippery.

1
vote

book cover

Verification of Sequential and Concurrent Programs, Second Edition, by Krzysztof R. Apt and Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog.

Maybe it was the subject matter, but I distinctly remember this as being the driest book I have ever read. Getting all the way to the end was a genuine soporific challenge.

0
votes

Programming Microsoft Visual C++, 5ed (Kruglinski, Shepherd, Wingo)

Not that the book was bad, but its title is very misleading, especially to people new to C++. The preface of the book promises to teach you how to program in VC++, and a background in C but not C++ is all you need. Truth be told, you absolutely cannot learn anything about C++ from this book.

I owned this book for about 10 years, and recently (after working for a C++/Windows job for 4 years) I started to find a few chapters to be a bit useful when explaining stuff to new hires.

People wishing to learn Windows Programming are advised to: (in chronological order)

  • Learn C (and preferably get a CS degree)
  • Find a C/C++ project team and join it, and focus on the pure C/C++ part of programming to master it
  • When something is needed, learn straight from MSDN (it has improved a lot in the last 4 years). Ask your coworkers for code snippets.
  • Finally, read this book. It will start to make sense.
1
  • Well, I can't see why you would expect to find much about C++ in a book with that title – in fact, I would have been annoyed if I'd bought it and then found out much of it is wasted on subjects I already know from books that are actually about C++. — But, of course, the authors shouldn't have made that claim in the preface then. Dec 17, 2011 at 20:25
-2
votes

We had a course at the university about knowledge systems. The book was real bad, it wasn't finished and hard to read. The teacher did not follow the book (although it was required for the course) and the exam consisted of multiple choise questions not related to both the book and the course. But fortunately the teacher reused questions of previous exams so the students learned them.

2
  • 4
    This sounds like "bad prof" not (just) "bad book"
    – Inaimathi
    Sep 27, 2010 at 17:10
  • 1
    "The teacher did not follow the book (although it was required for the course)" I could have said that for 75% of the courses I took in university. Sep 27, 2010 at 21:48
-2
votes

I have yet to come across a book that I haven't found useful.

I don't know why that is, but it is the way it is, isn't it?

1
  • 3
    Perhaps you haven't used any terrible books, or perhaps you are too generous: A book can be useful but still cost ten times the time and effort to glean the same value of another book.
    – Mark C
    Oct 15, 2010 at 8:17
-3
votes

There are far too many to list.

All of the SAMS books qualify.

I generally don't care to remember the dumb books. I sometimes just rip them down the spine (if they are paperback) and throw them out or burn them. I have not bought too many books recently.

2
  • 7
    You could still name one or two.
    – zneak
    Sep 27, 2010 at 18:27
  • 3
    You burn books?!!
    – Rook
    Sep 15, 2011 at 4:35

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.