My immediate thought was that there has to be a lot of downright lame animals that would make an entire series totally uninteresting and unfit for sales. My second thought was to make a list of said animals. The latter would later prove to, more or less, put a hold to updates of this blog. I really have had a hard time coming up with animals that I feel unequivocally suck and which I would not feel at all bad about including in that category. Don’t get me wrong, there really are an abundance of boring animals (i.e. the cod, the slug and the stick insect). There’s definitely also a lot of cute animals which at varying degrees would make oneself steer cleer of books featuring them on their cover (i.e. the cat, the dog, and the dolphin). Then there’s the category of animals which bring about dislike (i.e. flies, scorpions and cockroaches). Snakes and sharks could very well fall into this category as well.

Anyhow, my top choices so far for lame O’Reilly series animals are as follows:

(1) The hermit crab (Programming .NET Components)

(2) The stupid dog trick (VBScript Pocket Reference)

(3) The cow (Practical C)

(4) The boring cat (as opposed to most cats, who are fun. UML in a Nutshell)

(5) The opossum (ActionScript Cookbook)

(6) The biting shark (Web Security)

(7) The ass (Hardening Cisco Routers)

Stay cool, steer clear.