conceptual inertia

Few programming books offer substance. Most are re-hashed documentation. They are filled with tables detailing API methods, parameters, bit flags, and so forth. It’s an exercise in tedium to wade through such material. Perhaps the marketing department demands that books be of a certain size and weight. A customer is not going to spend $40 to $100 dollars on a thin book. Every fool knows a books value is proportional to its weight.