On Friday night, Mrs Elbeno remarked to me: “There’s a book sale tomorrow!” Luckily she had read about it in the paper, because I had forgotten it, even though I received the reminder by email from the mayor. So on Saturday morning we headed down to the library at about 9.40 to trawl through the books. The first thing I noticed was the relative paucity of books compared to the usual sales, and that there were quite a few people already there. However, this did not hamper our parking or our enjoyment of the sale.
We happened on another box of Hardy Boys books which we snapped up immediately (we now have 31 volumes), setting them against the time when mini-Elbeno will be able to devour them. Among a few other finds, I also picked up some photography books: The Tao of Photography and Photography, as well as 8 volumes of the 17-strong Life Library of Photography that I plumped for on a whim.
Sadly this time around there were no real finds in the computer textbook department. There are generally two kinds of computer textbook. The first kind is the computer science kind, often subtitled something like “Principles and Practice”. These I buy. One of the things about principles is that they seldom go out of date, so I am quite happy to buy CS- and mathematically-oriented books from as far back as the 70s. The second kind is the “learn this language/API/proprietary software/thing that nobody in 3 years’ time will still be using” kind. Unless I am interested in learning a particular language or I find a canonical title, I steer clear of these. If I want to learn that kind of thing, there are umpteen online references I can look to. I hemmed and hawed a bit about a couple of O’Reilly books, but they were just the wrong side of the line.