These are the books I’ve come across that are exceptional, in some way, for their badness. I recommend you give all these a pass…

  • DHTML Utopia Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM by Stuart Langridge (SitePoint)

    This book was little more than a bunch of instructions on what to copy and paste to get a few effects done. Barely any explanation of what was happening under the hood. Big fonts and thing margins make this a sizeable book for the content. If it was a tiny book with cd and called, easy scripts for websites, it would have been much better off.

  • Beginning ActionScript 2.0 by Nathan Derksen (Wrox)

    The book just was bad from beginning to end. The writing was poor, the examples were poor - not that everyone has to do things the same way but they just did everything different than the way I did, and it rubbed me the wrong way. They’d have gotten by, though, if they hadn’t spelled out in detail the way boolean operators work - but incorrectly. They simply don’t seem to understand short circuit operators and it makes all the other more stylistic problems more problematic. Plus, if they got that wrong which I was only able to spot because every language uses short circuit operators, what else have they got wrong that I don’t spot because it is a new language to me?