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

[chaseman]

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.

[Philip]

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.

[Maq]

Click on the "Miscellaneous" section and do a search for "Book".  See what other people are recommending and learning from.

[chaseman]

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.

[KevinM1]

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.