Here’s a non-technical post of something humorous that happened to me today.

I ordered Writing Compilers and Interpreters by Ronald Mak from Amazon. I have several of Mak’s books and this edition has some new stuff I wanted to look at. I reviewed the table of contents on Amazon and it had the standard chapters you’d expect in a compiler book: Scanning, Symbol Tables, etc.

The book arrived today. I started thumbing through to the new stuff and found the following chapters: Forms, Cascading Style Sheets, jQuery UI. What? I flipped back to the cover – yeah it’s the right cover. Flipped back into the book – HTML, CSS. I turned to the table of contents Beginning HTML and CSS. It’s this book right here.

Somehow the wrong contents were put into the right book cover. I have never seen this before in my life. How exactly do you explain that to Amazon’s return department? Moral of the story – don’t judge a book by its cover.