I can't speak for the two novels, but I've read the short story First Contact by Murray Leinster referenced near the beginning of the article, and I have to disagree regarding it being clever. Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but I think it's really contrived and it doesn't hold up.

Spoilers below, if you don't want to read a badly aged sci-fi story from 75 years ago.

A human and an alien spaceship randomly encounter each other in deep space and can't be sure that the other won't track them back to their homeworld. So, they come up with the "clever" solution of ripping out all their long-range sensors and wiping their navigation logs and then swapping spaceships! That way they both know that the other ship can't track them because they each sabotaged their own sensors. It's really dumb because you can imagine that there must be differences in levels of technology like metallurgy, life support, propulsion, etc, but the story didn't even give those concerns a passing nod.

Then, like much sci-fi of that era, it has to end with a punchline as one of the human officers proclaims that he trusts them after all because he spent the past few weeks sharing dirty jokes with his alien counterpart... who evolved on a different world and probably has a radically different biology and sexual practices.