OT: Books for "Idiots" (Was: PDP-11/44 boot prompt

On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, Jim Strickland wrote: [more than 10 years old] John Muir's Volkswagen "idiot" book sold over 1.5 million copies, and launched a trend of marketing books by insulting the reader in the title. It was a great book. But then the publisher decided to make an entire series out of it. John Muir promptly died of a brain tumor. (Some people will do ANYTHING to get out of participation in a badly conceived project.) Soon there was a VW Rabbit book, and a Honda book. [If you check out the Honda book, you'll see that I know what I'm talking about on it.] The subsequent books still had the fantastic illustrating talent of Peter Aschwanden, but just were NOT on a par with the original book. The final straw was when the editor of the Honda book REFUSED to include a flow chart that the authors had developed on the grounds that "normal people don't understand flowcharts". Now there are dozens of publishers of books for "idiots", "dummies", "morons", and "obnoxious ignorant neo-Luddite jerks". Some of them are actually pretty good, IN SPITE OF their titles, but none are on a par with John Muir's original VW book. Particularly that HONDA book! (where at least ONE of the authors was smart enough to switch to a pseudonym!) -- Fred Cisin (not a pseudonym) cisin(a)xenosoft.com XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com 2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366 Berkeley, CA 94710-2219