Not a fan of the over-opinionated framing. It seems like mainly a list of things that are "dated" (which I'd personally find pretty interesting, for various reasons) and/or politically incorrect from the author's orientation.
Some of these books may have some limited historical interest. That's fine. But that doesn't mean they should be in a public library, especially when they run the risk of misrepresenting historical information or beliefs as truth.
That book looks interesting, and the blogger's justification for weeding it is "I don't understand video game development", not "there is a more modern book to use instead".
> Is it better to misrepresent contemporary beliefs as truth?
The possibility that a modern book may be incorrect does not override the fact that older books about rapidly changing topics (like the book on HIV/AIDS) will contain information which has been superseded or disproven, or that compilations of time-sensitive information (like the 1989 directory of self-help groups) are useless when they become outdated.
> That book looks interesting, and the blogger's justification for weeding it is "I don't understand video game development"...
The more detailed justification is: this is a simple book (48 pages, large type, lots of pictures) made for children. Nuances like "computers don't use BASIC anymore" or "the video game industry has changed a lot since then" are likely to be lost on them -- and, to be frank, there was never a lot of concrete information in the book to begin with.
I actually remember checking that exact book out from the library as a kid! The section in programming in BASIC included a code snippet which had your computer beep, which I could never get to work in QBASIC from what I remember.
Oh, nice find. And that just cements my feelings that this book should have been weeded years ago:
* The author conflates the NES with all "home game systems". An entire chapter titled "how it works" describes the NES (in very broad terms) without ever acknowledging the existence of other game systems -- not even the SNES, which came out six years before the book was published.
* There are some unforced technical errors in the book, like claiming that a device called a "synthesizer" is used to "translate [sounds] into computer codes", or that "with an RGB monitor, the signals go straight from the CPU to the screen". This is not a carefully researched and written book. It's an author's quick swing at "kids like video games, we should write a book about those".
* Despite what you might assume from the excerpt, the book does not actually provide any actionable information about game programming. The BASIC snippet seen on the web site is only used to motivate a claim that games contain "lots and lots of commands", not to suggest that the reader can program a game.
Not a fan of the over-opinionated framing. It seems like mainly a list of things that are "dated" (which I'd personally find pretty interesting, for various reasons) and/or politically incorrect from the author's orientation.