Self Help Scam

I was having fun reading Rich Dad Poor Dad over the last week. I regard it as light reading, seeing as how it's an entire book written about a few very basic (and by now commonsense) ideas that are backed up by experiences that go so incredibly well that it simply leaves one wondering at just how unembellished they are. Simply put, it is the kind of book that just makes one wish to go get a proper financial education, and that's probably its greatest value. Now, self-help books have been rather popular for quite some time now. In fact, they seem to have a goodly bit of entertainment value. However, I do question the value of self-help tomes. Like the intellectual junk food I was talking about earlier, self-help books seem to be rather good at giving people a nice warm and fuzzy feeling inside, but come out of it little better off (if at all) from the reading experience. Some have criticized self-help books for being scams. I don't know if all of them are, but I certainly do think they have done rather well to make the authors (and their publishing houses) significantly richer than they started off. After reading a book like this and the other intellectual junk food, I would think it is just simply wiser to find a good text on the subject one is truly interested in and just read that. At the very least it'll impart some technical knowledge in the matter.