But my general belief is that anything people put energy into, someone has thought about pretty hard. And if someone has thought about it pretty hard, then someone else (likely several people in fact) has probably put that thought into a book. Given current search tools, it should be possible to locate that book if it is out there. Just look for a book on the topic with good reviews where an independent search on the author comes up with glowing reviews.

And indeed it doesn't take long to run a few searches, sanity cross-check, and find at least one promising candidate that I got from this list. Indeed I suspect that some time spent with any book on that list would be very worthwhile.

Of course take that with a grain of salt. I hate gambling. About all I know about poker is that the purpose of bluffing bad hands is to make it impossible for people to be sure of whether you have a good hand when you do.

But after a short bit of research it isn't much of a gamble to say that David Sklansky is probably a good place to start for trying to learn poker.

Now if we could only convince people trying to learn Perl to use my strategy, some of those bad titles out there might not sell so well... :-(