First Books
Last weekend, I decided that I needed to clean off some of my bookshelves. I packed up about 60 pounds of D&D books, 5 years worth of Dragon magazines, and a good sized (30 pounds or so) of old technical books. I sold the D&D books and Dragon magazines for $155 in store credit at a local store. I probably could have gotten more money out of them on eBay or something like that, but I was more in the mood to get rid of them than get rich off of them.
I knew that no respectable book store would take the technical books that I had because they were all from the late 1990s. I ended up recycling the books, and it kind of pained me to get rid of them. Among the books that I tossed out was my first Javascript book, my first CSS book, my first HTML book, my first PHP book, and my first Sendmail book. There were lots of firsts that I threw out, but I’ve replaced all of them over the past few months with more up-to-date books. It’s not like I’m throwing away knowledge. It’s just stuff that I either already know by heart, or is so outdated that it is no longer worth it.
Even though I threw out lots of old technical books, I still could not bring myself to throw away my first two Linux books that I bought way back in 1996 when Linux was just emerging on the scene as a possible operating system for the world. I’m sure that both books are horribly worthless in technical knowledge, but they’re going to stay on my shelves for now.
