Historically I&#x27;ve noticed that libraries are often terrible at distinguishing good from bad when it comes to technical books.  Sorting through the books being thrown out, I&#x27;ve often found real classics mixed in with the likes of <i>Learn Excel 98 In 24 Hours</i>.<p>This also happens with used bookstores, but in that case the upshot is, instead, that used bookstores won&#x27;t buy technical books, so they never make it onto their shelves.<p>Nowadays I almost entirely get my technical information online, in part because of having moved to Argentina, where there weren&#x27;t very many technical books in the first place — our famous national abundance of bookstores are dedicated almost entirely to fiction and opinion, rather than knowledge in the sense of falsifiable propositions.