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In 1996, Barnes and Nobel was flooded with huge volumes like "Learn C in 21 Days" and "Effective Bash Programming." These books had 6-10 authors and were basically printed on newspaper, and were absolutely horrible. These sat next to Computer Shopper and high quality books like K&R and the red book.

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I know what you mean, Borders did the same thing. But whenever someone mentions "The Red Book", I always wonder whether they're talking about the OpenGL Programming Guide or the PostScript Language Reference.

DOD Security Standards. Also known as the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On A Shelf.

and in Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size"

Or the Apple ][ Reference Manual

My first though is the Red Book specification for CDROMS.

Oh yeah, technicolor rainbow.

1996? Half the books were probably permutations on "Learn Java in 21 Days."

IIRC, the most common 21 days type books were about visual basic, delphi, c++ and java. I learned all 4 in that order in the 90's, but thankfully i had better books.

Not that today's books are that much better. Pick up a php book sometime, they're even worse than php itself is.

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