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How to Weed Out the Good Books from the Bad Books?


chaseman

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This is a question about books in general, not specifically programming books.

 

When you look for new books how do you weed out the good ones from the bad ones?

 

I've figured that I can not trust Amazon reviews anymore. I got disappointed with some books, which I bought based on good Amazon reviews.

 

I'm trying to figure out a new way to research books before buying.

Go to your local bookstore or library and read/skim it there. Everyone is going to have a different take on a book and the only way to know if you'll like it is to actually read it.

Local book store doesn't really do it for me, I read a lot of English books though I'm from Europe.

Amazon reviews can be misleading.  I normally try to only buy products that have a decent number of reviews, as the quantity of reviews helps to remove the outlying scores from consideration.  You can feel pretty confident in a product that has 125 out of 170 four and five star reviews.  It's not a foolproof method, but it works well enough for me.

 

When that fails, I generally try to compare scores across websites, and if it's a technical book, see if any blogs mention/review it.

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