I recently moved my personal website from WordPress to a static site hosted on GitHub Pages. Whilst going through all of the pages that needed to be converted, I found this set of book reviews that I had written between 2001 and 2012.
It’s interesting to see how times have changed. Back then, I had a huge collection of computer books and (as you’ll see from the reviews) I was being sent new books by publishers on a pretty regular basis. These days, the computing section of any book shop (if you can find a book shop!) will be about a fifth of the size it was twenty years ago. People just don’t buy computer books anymore. I guess we’ve finally learned that they go out of date before they get into the shops.
Like, I expect, most of us, I tried to give most of my computer book collection to second-hand bookshops five years ago. They weren’t interested and most of them went into the recycling.
But we still have the reviews. Even if most of the books are no longer available. If you click the Amazon links you’ll find that either book is out of stock or it’s ridiculously expensive because it’s rare.
Something else I noticed while setting up this site - lots of the authors had set up their own website to promote their books. And, twenty or so years later they’ve let those domains lapse. So most of the links either no longer exist or now take you to spammy sites that you really don’t want to visit.
Oh, and all of the links to the publishers catalogues are “http” instead of “https”.
Enjoy the reviews…