Yes and no... just as a single data point, my behavior tends to be to look for the "popular" technical references and choose from those. If a book has a small

Yes and no... just as a single data point, my behavior tends to be to look for the "popular" technical references and choose from those. If a book has a small number of excellent reviews, I probably won't choose that over a book with a large number of average-to-good reviews. I'm not arguing this is rational, just something I noticed myself doing - if others are the same, I can see a feedback loop where more reviews lead to more purchases.