A visit to the Book Thing yielded some interesting books. (The Book Thing gives away books, mostly used books from different vintages. You can find them here: http://www.bookthing.org)
I came home with a several recent books and a couple of "early vintage" books. The recent ones include:
"Mac OS X Hacks"
"Python Cookbook"
"lex and yacc"
"Practical C++ Programming"
These are all from O'Reilly, the well-known and well-respected publisher.
The early vintage books (from the pre-PC era, in my mind) include:
"The Joy of Minis and Micros" by Stein and Shapiro
"Human Performance Engineering" by Robert W. Bailey
"Programming Business Computers" by McCracken, Weiss, and Lee
"Joy" and "HPE" are from 1981 and 1982, so possibly not strictly from the pre-IBM PC era, but neither talk about IBM PCs, MS-DOS, Windows, or the internet. Indeed, "HPE" is more about psychology than technology.
"Programming Business Computers" is a very nice text and I picked it up after I saw the name "McCracken" on the spine. I have a few books by him on Fortran and I find his books both informative and readable. (More readable than many of the O'Reilly books.) I guess that is known as star power -- I picked up the book because of the author, not the content. (I find the content informative, although a bit dated. Yet I enjoy the reading of the book. Reading tech books as literature?)
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