Ask HN: What do you do with old technical books?
On the question of which to get rid of, the candidates fall into two groups.
1. Technologies that are pretty much dead now. It's very hard to imagine that I'm ever again going to need to crack open "Undocumented DOS" or "Inside AppleTalk", for example.
2. Technologies that are still in use, but my books cover older editions. For example, I have the second and third editions of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language", and also several other C++ books from that era. I haven't done C++ in long enough that I've largely forgotten the language, and will probably need to relearn it at some point.
C++ has grown a lot since those books were written, but it seems much of what is in them would still be valid, and one might even argue that for something like this learning an older, simpler version first might be better.
For getting rid of books, the obvious thing that comes to mind is tossing them in the recycling bin. Mine takes paperbacks, and hardbacks if the covers are removed first, so this would be easy.
A coworker suggests trying to sell them to a used bookstore or giving them to a used bookstore if they don't want to buy them. I don't like that, at least for books in the first category above, because they could end up bought by someone trying to get into technology who doesn't realize that these are dead technologies.