I read Peter Norton's Inside the IBM PC (1986 edition) [1] a while back, out of an interest in computer history. It struck me as being quite a bit different than today's technical books. It had a very conversational writing style, and it seemed like it was aiming to accommodate computer hobbyists/enthusiasts who wanted to learn more about how their machine actually worked. There were probably a lot more such people back in the 80's than today.
I remember reading a book on Delphi, some early version, it was a detective with some coding.
If only I could remember the author, can't google anything right now.
Yes, this was a great book - Jeff writes fiction these days, but has updated his "Assembly Language Step by Step" for Linux and has a nice FOSS book on FreePascal
[1] https://archive.org/details/insideibmpc00nort