Ranking every Book from WORST to BEST (Stardew Valley 1.6)

I will say if you put all the legendary fish and their siblings from the qi quest in fish ponds and give all of them golden animal crackers you will make a huge amount of gold from putting the roe in preserve jars! :3 but I will agree that book in particular definitely doesn't feel very exciting or useful

Roe is pretty decent as food, so I like roe in treasure chests early game.

Nimble/Thick below Raccoon's guide? Oddly harsh. That was the very first book I got in my current run, it was certainly useful at that point. And I'm not generally stacking defense foods, so having it is very nice. Raccoon's guide, as you mention, comes too late in a run to matter all that much. The 2nd book I got was Jewels of the Sea, it's certainly okay, but I was less happy about that than Nimble/Thick.

I appreciated Art o Crabbing when it took me two whole seasons to catch a lobster, and you need two if you want to give one to Gus. Getting two was such a relief

Jewels of the Sea is good for getting sturgeon row to complete the theatre bundle without building a fish pound. Also if you want to complete the full shipment achieve with out building a pond.

i get the feeing the roe book is for people that dont want to build fish ponds. similar to how fruit bat enjoyers dont need fruit trees.

Edit to add: Jack be nimble/jack be thick essentially adds a -1 damage mitigation to enemies through the game, and it's entirely passive meaning you're just tankier. +1 defence mightnt be much, but it could be the difference between being one shot and surviving on 1HP. Additionally eggplant parmesian is better and more accessible than mango sticky rice, but requires lewis to be at 7 hearts. they both give the exact same defence buff, but the parmesian also gives a mining buff.
All in all defence wise you could be looking at a defence stat of 25 defence with dragonscale boots (+7), three topaz' on your weapon (+3, i'm not going to use the dwarven dagger here which can buff your defence higher), two crabshell rings (+10), qi seasoned eggplant parmesian (+4), and jack be nimble (+1) for a total of 25 defence stat. using the dwarven dagger gives you an additional +6 giving you a defence stat of 31, meaning that enemies suffer -31 damage to all attacks they dish out at you. every point of defence counts, please dont say jack be nimble is useless

I was really happy to see the Jewels of Seas book in my current playthrough as I had the Fish farm remix bundle, and I did not want to use a fish ponds on this farm. Bonus I also pick up several sturgeon roe in the process, so I got some easy Caviar as well.

The only thing I use of CJB's Cheat Menu mod is the freeze time option. But I get it to install a mod just for one single thing to use of it.