If you go online or go to one of the larger book retailers in your local area, you will find that there are lots of books on forex trading. They are becoming increasingly popular as forex trading continues to grow and grow, but how useful are these books in reality?Well the important thing to remember is that the people who write these books are not usually professional full-time traders. If they were they wouldn't be spending months and months putting together a book in the hope of earning a bit of extra money, because they could be earning far more from forex trading.Therefore when you pick up a book written by someone who claims to be a full-time trader, you should be very wary because most of the time this isn't the case. The same is true regarding many of the courses and products being sold online by so-called professionals.As a result of all this you should keep your expectations low because if you are looking for a tried and tested forex trading system, you are likely to be disappointed. Some books will provide you with various trading strategies, but from my own personal experience most of these will turn out to be unprofitable in the long run.Any pro trader who has a proven trading method will generally keep it to themselves, and will definitely not give it away in a cheap $20 book that's available to the general public. They would either trade it themselves and reap the rewards, or sell it for a much higher price online.Forex books do still serve a purpose, however. Whilst they may not necessarily provide you winning trading strategies, they can provide you with a great education in general. They can teach you the basics of forex trading, for instance, and they can also teach you about the more technical aspects of forex trading. So you will find books on technical analysis, pivot points, fibonacci trading and day trading, for example.So to summarize, I would say that you cannot expect to learn how to become a profitable forex trader just by reading a few books. However you can learn about every single aspect of this lucrative industry and arm yourself with the knowledge needed to take your trading to the next level. Therefore you could argue that forex books are ideally suited for the beginner and intermediate traders rather than the more experienced traders.