This is rather off-topic (ie, not OM-specific), but I thought it might
be of interest, and hopefully it won't provoke a flurry of responses.
Many people in this group are perceived as knowledgable and so are asked
photographic questions by their friends. (I've recently been fielding a
lot of them from a good friend who's just gotten back into "serious"
photography.)
We can't always answer in depth, so it's tempting to suggest that they
buy a book. (When I was a kid, I learned tons of things simply by
borrowing books from the library.) When I was at Borders yesterday, I
perused the Photography section, noting with pleasure that the Ansel
Adams books are back in print as paperbacks.
Anyhow, I noticed the "Dummies" and "Idiots" guides to photography. I
opened the latter first, and was flabbergasted -- just browsing a few
pages of the book, I found two major errors. (The author -- whom I've
never heard of -- recommends using a polarizing filter to reduce lens
flare. I can't remember what the other error was.)
The Dummies book was prepared with the help of Kodak and didn't have
_obvious_ errors. (In case you're wondering -- I have this uncanny
ability to skim books and find errors.)
Over the past 30 years I've become aware that publishers are often so
anxious to issue a book that they don't care who writes it, and they
don't bother to hire knowledgable (ie, expensive) editors.
It used to be that most technical books were written by qualified
people. This is no longer true. You might want to be cautious about
recommending books you haven't seen.
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