Book Series and Strange Titles

This morning I just happened to see this book, and it set me thinking. I realize, of course, that Visual Quickstart Guide is the series title, and so they kept it on this book so as to match the other books in the series. Nonetheless, the idea of having a visual guide to text-based markup standards is... funny. Well, it's funny to me. So this set me thinking about what other bizarre or oxymoronic titles there could be, if books on certain topics were published as part of a series with a poorly-matched series title...

• sed and awk Visual Quickstart Guide


• Brain Surgery for Dummies


• Teach Yourself Patience in 21 Days


• : Quick & Easy


• Emacs: The Missing Manual

Chain Forwards on the Web

Well, I've been tagged.

Back in 1996, I used to receive (and ignore) email messages with these kinds of instructions all the time, but this is the first time I've ever seen it outside the context of email. In honor of the fact that it's the first time, I'm actually going to attempt to play along somewhat. This time only.

I am currently reading Greenspan's book, and happen to have it sitting within eight inches of my keyboard. It's a fascinating read by the way. I'm on page 339 at the moment, but backtracking to page 123 (which just happens to be the first page of chapter six), here are sentences 6-8:

...In the process, the demise of central planning exposed the almost unimaginable extent of the rot that had accumulated over decades.

But the biggest surprise that awaited me was an extraordinary tutorial on the roots of market capitalism. This is the system with which, of course, I am most familiar, but my understanding of its foundations was wholly abstract...

That part was easy. Now the business about sending it on to (err, tagging) five more people, that's another matter. My blog is kind of atypical. Almost all visitors find a specific post (most commonly this one, as it happens) through a search engine, in the same way one would find content on a traditional website. I guess you could say I'm on the fringes of the (do I have to hate myself for using this word?) blogosphere. Naturally, the two people whom I have some reason to believe might occasionally drop by just to see if I've posted anything lately have both already been tagged.

Very well, there's nothing in the instructions that says you can only tag people whom you're confident will read the post and know they were tagged. So, in the spirit of following the letter of the instructions and ignoring the intent, I'm tagging Andy Jentes (a friend who, as far as I know, does not have a web presence at the moment), Dave Gable (another friend, going by the handle randomneuralfirings over at Xanga), Derek Lowe (a biochemist over at pipeline.corante.com), Dan Ritter (a hardware reviewer from down under -- dansdata.blogsome.com), and, umm, Tim Vroom (of perlmonks.org fame). Hey, why not?