I can tell you the WORST: O’Reilly’s Mac OS in a Nutshell.
Got it and almost immediately started to file error reports. Gave up after about a dozen. Book was about classic Mac OS was never updated or replaced with a Mac OS X book. Which is just as well.
Dave
What’s wonderful about James’ post here is that he was using an M machine—the BBC Micro—long before there were any iPhones or M Macs, with its ARM CPU, its Acorn RISC Machine:
But aren’t we all old! My first computer related book will have been a Fortran text, owned in ‘63. Left my copies of Inside Mac in Japan following the Kobe quake, so that the oldest book I’ve now got must be from ‘92:
For purely sentimental reasons, from ‘94 or thereabouts, I see I’ve also hung on to
Ahhh—great topic!!
To be fair, an M-series SoC is a lot more than just the ARM CPU cores.
But yes, all those ARM-based CPUs all grew out of that original processor developed by Acorn Computers.
It’s probably the most popular CPU architecture today, found in most cell phones (including SoCs from Apple and Qualcomm), all modern Apple products, most smart devices, and even in data center servers.
Yep, as per Wikipedia: “With over 230 billion ARM chips produced since at least 2003, and with its dominance increasing every year, ARM is the most widely used family of instruction set architectures”. Take a bath, Intel…
What do you consider to be old? Isn’t 80 supposed to be the “new 30”?
;-)
Trouble is, 80 ain’t! But we’re doing better than some of these old books—why on earth am I keeping anything on ResEdit?? 
But what a delight it is to scan over the titles here— and all the back copies of MacUser are on line, not to mention MacWorld.
We’ve been lucky, we’ve had Macs (the Plus, the IIci, the SE30, and now these wonderful ARM SoCs). And what a bunch of books.
I wonder, does journalism count? Because there’s that excellent book on Tom West & Data General from ‘81:
“a good man in a storm”…
Arrgh! When I said Fire in the Valley was #2, I meant The Soul of a New Machine. Which means, I’ve lost track of where my copy is. Maybe in one of the boxes of books I never unpacked when I last moved.
But Fire in the Valley is a great book—I for one have always had a copy. The second edition is particularly valuable.
That wonderful story of the naming of Ed Roberts’ computer:
‘“Why don’t you call it Altair? That’s where the Enterprise is going tonight”. –Lauren Solomon, daughter of Popular Electronics editor Les Solomon.’
Tanabata come to Earth! 
A bit off topic, but… Ahh, The Soul of a New Machine brings back memories. Not only of reading the book (I have an earlier printing than the picture you’ve posted), but having worked for DG at the time all of those events happened. I attended the NCC show referenced in the book (booth duty for DG) and also met several of the people in the book (even had a few drinks with Tom West as well). Met folks that worked on that ill-fated Fountainhead project (which would have been very interesting to see if hadn’t been so ahead of it’s time).
Well worth the read.
Not off topic—life beats a book! Fancy you knew Tom West—Kidder’s description of his basement workshops alone makes him a remarkable person. What a pity it is he’s gone…
Nice! I have this one too.
The earliest one I have that exists as a photo in my iPhone is for the Acorn Electron which is what we had.
I also have this one from 1982.
My earliest programming efforts were with FORTRAN 4 on the ICL 1900 university computer for my engineering PhD, using paper tape and an enormous stack of punched cards. But for home computing, I had great fun with the ‘amazing’ Sinclair ZX81 with its expensive 16k expansion pack. Then I logged into the Apple ecosystem with the Apple IIc ‘laptop‘, the Apple IIGS colour computer, the Mac LC630, a succession of iMacs and now the M1 Mac Studio. In the 1980s I looked forward to the monthly BYTE mag and various Apple mags too. But the IIGS programming was the most fun, and I introduced my kids to the amazing Hypercard app, and they enthusiastically produced a monthly Hypercard news stack for the family and were often published in the online Hypercard community. As a result, one son has a PhD in Computer Science and is a prominent professional Apple app programmer.
I had a Z80 card in a IIc – just to run Wordstar. Why on earth I wanted to run Wordstar when I had the perfectly good Zardax word processor I’ll never know – but it does remind me of two more computer tomes, the Wordstar and Zardax manuals. Here’s the latter:
Zardax sounds like the name of a character from Doctor Who or Star Trek. 
Or an arcade game machine. 
Product names have become a lot more boring over the decades since, alas.
Yep, a word processor fit for a Time Lord, Zardax was… 
