Blarg: ...

Undesirable: Skill books have a random chance to spawn inside any bookcase. If you keep re-loading your game BEFORE you even move your mouse over a new bookcase that you come across, you will eventually get a random skill book. If you have already touched it with your mouse cursor and no skill book appeared, you will need to reload your game to have another chance of one spawning, otherwise the bookcase will remain empty or contain standard books.
The stats of equipment drops from elite monsters are random, calculated at the point of their death. So it is best to save your game JUST BEFORE you finish off a tough monster and check out the loot it drops to see if it suits your needs. For example, some of the elite orcs in the Orc Camp east of the Army Barracks drop the best charms in the game. They are accessible quite early and it is a fairly trivial matter of freezing and attacking them with ranged attacks, saving your game just before you kill them, re-load if nothing useful is dropped, and repeat until you get what you want.
Some of the best items in the game are available deceptively early, and they appear in specific locations and have set names attached to them. The reason for them being better than other items is that although the stats are still random, the quality of the stats is higher than usual. At optimal, you'll want to obtain Charm 5 for every piece of your equipment with decent stats that suit the class you're aiming for, although achieving this may require a certain amount of patience. Examples of the best equipment are at this link: http://www.gamebanshee.com/divinedivinity/armorweapons.php
Remember, be careful before you move that mouse cursor over bookcases, equipment in shops, and containers that may hold valuable items as the stats are generated then. Get the skill Identify 5 as soon as possible. Oh, and be careful before you insert charms in your gear, as you cannot remove them in Divine Divinity.