the Modern Drunkard is a pretty funny self-help for drunks who’d prefer to stay that way. 
All books are self help books if you read em right.
Specifically self help? maybe the directions on a tube of hemorrhoid cream.
very handy
I read the thread title to mean an entirely different concept of “self-help”. The kind people are listing are … unhelpful in my experience. Either obvious stuff or worthless gimmicks. That book, The Secret, that Oprah pushed years ago is a perfectly bad example.
To me, a good self-help book is like A Book On C by Kelley and Pohl . It was the perfect book to teach myself C way back when I wanted to learn it. Simple, direct, nice examples, etc. Kept around for a long time for frequent reference.
The latter, I believe, is a good sign for a self-help book. Does it help you in real life? Do you keep looking up stuff in it for years and years?
Yeah, but one person’s “obvious stuff” is another person’s “somehow I never learned that” or “I never thought of it that way before,” which is why such books can be genuinely helpful to people.
This thread started a decade ago, and its OP doesn’t seem to be still around; but if he’s still interested in “a list of the biggest best and most popular self help books,” I’d point him to Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Self-Help Classics for one list and summary.