“one of the worst books about programming I've tried to read”

The gripe about the mind-numbing thoroughness of Code Complete is much like my own experience of Wrox's book about Javascript for programmers.

They have a separate book for web designers. I expect it covers stuff like drop-down menus and form validation.

The book for programmers kept going on about all the great stuff that ECMA-standard Javascript could do, immediately followed by the caveat that "You can't really do this in practice" because some browser breaks that specific feature of Javascript.

I expect the book would be good for someone who was writing a Javascript framework, and needed to know about all the browser-specific problems so they would also know they needed to work around the problems.

But for me, just trying to learn the language, well it was mind-numbing. Happily for me, I had not purchased it. I returned it to the library without reading the whole thing.