Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites.
Must be something about hacker books that's in the water. Lots of sites with lots of features and such means better resources for all hackers, plus lots of folks getting experiences doing stuff like this. Most excellent!
Since I've done this, I guess I should say something pithy or insightful. I think the trick is the navigation piece. I see you have categories -- that's probably a good place to start. I started with questions, you can go to my main page, click on the hacker-related question you have, and be presented with a sorted list of answers based on your experience. (see http://hn-books.com/ )
I'm not sure if questions are the way to go either, though, as there are a zillion questions hackers might ask. I'd still like to see somebody come up with some new ideas in this area.
I also ran into the "just what are hacker books, anyway?" question that we get over here all of the time. I finally said screw it, I'll just put things that I believe are hacker-related. But I don't think there's any easy answer to that one, either.
Outstanding site, though! I hope some of these other guys that have spoken to me will post what they've done as well.
Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites.
I'm not surprised. I've been working on my own half-baked version. Kudos to those of you who finished the baking.
thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too.
I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :)
I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books!
In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!
Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know.
Cool work!
EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382
I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
Daniel, I really like your site and the curated list.
However, I find the categories in HackerBooks.com much more easier to navigate than questions on the right side bar of hn-books.
Both of the sites still need to address the question, 'how do I present the categories without requiring too much navigation'.
I know it's not sexy any more but how about tag-cloud per major category?
What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user.
The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn-books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like.
I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too.
When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now.
So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in.
EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn-books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=... Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)
Daniel, The ctrl-click feature is really cool.
I hear you about feature creep. I am struggling with similar issues with what I am working on.
I keep reminding myself Every piece of software I paid for recently is dead simple to use
Search facets are likely the best and fastest filtering mechanism for the users. It's pretty much just a straight products site with some recommendation engine. Just start faceting out the books by a few criteria, topic, length, proficiency level, etc.
The autocomplete is fancy, but it involves: a) typing; b) spelling; and c) using the arrow keys and the enter key. Facets will let you get to the same place in a few clicks. You can always do both, though.
As quite a few have asked via the comment form: it's a nginx + passenger + ruby 1.9.2 stack, with solr for indexing, mongodb for data back-end, rails fragment caching in redis, and a warmup script to fill the caches.
Well I'm more used to Redis, as I've used more than a couple of times with Resque (job processing in Ruby).
I started the crawler behind HackerBooks with Resque and Redis, but ended up saving some RAM by going back to a simple daemon. I reused Redis to provide the caching.
on that note,
hackertext, hackermenu, hackerledger, hackerconventions, hackerelite, hackerplans, hackermanifest, hackerstatement, hackerplay, hackersection, hackervolumes, etc... all seem to be free. (shameless plug for nametoolkit.com - downvote me if you wish ;))
Thank you for building this. I admire the simplicity and elegance. Would be cool if the "Mentioned 2 times at Hackernews" was hyperlinked to the mention. Can this be done?
Yes I know about Daniel's site, which was released while I was working on hackerbooks.com. I decided to keep working on it anyway, but it took me a fair amount of time to release.
I recently registered fivegoodbooks.com with the plans of trying to reduce choice aversion for technical books. i.e. the top 5 referenced books by the community to start learning a subject. This is really nice work, now I'm the one to have to decide if I keep working on it :)
Thanks for your kind words! Well I can see myself using both sites, really :)
That' what I learned from working on http://www.learnivore.com too - at the same time came out http://rubytu.be/, but I used both actually, and some people preferred one, some other the other.
Nice domain name... got me thinking. I wish there existed a community I respected that curated books on all topics. Like, I'd love to have fivegoodbooks extend from topics like Ruby and Python to Russian History and Urban Planning.
Another interesting idea maybe would be to map the annotations/bibliographies of all books, so I could start with books I've read and better see what kind of linkings exist. You could visually see the seminal works in a field and all the branchings. Maybe that already exists in some form?
Interesting. I had a shower idea(tm) one morning where the combination of a rating and user-supplied biographical data at the time of the rating (e.g. "I was a novice with Python when I read it") determined a book's effectiveness.
The idea was founded on the tendency that people are skill-biased when rating books. They might dislike a book for being confusing or too easy because it wasn't designed for them at the time of reading. This was an attempt to figure out which books were just bad, and which were only rated bad because they were read without proper experience (or too much).
Ultimately, using community data, a visitor would be able to discover a "bookpath" of great resources that syncs up with their level of skill.
The wiki approach would be great if the data was laid out appropriately. Community-edited wiki might lead to a singular view of what a good path would be.
The benefit of a multi-axis rating system is that you could lay out data using different permutations and add/subtract inputs (e.g. rater's experience at time of rating/age/hell, maybe even personality type). I'm sort of modeling this off of robust scientific questionnaires.
It does seem to require some more user involvement, but nothing a fantastic UI couldn't fix.
I really like this idea, especially if the "bookpaths" converge.. i.e. the ruby path and python path converge to broader topics such as general software development (pragmatic programmer etc.)
Useful, and also a neat way to make some side-cash via your affiliate link. I suspect I'll be checking this regularly.
One thing that would be really handy - or at least interesting - is a "most recently mentioned" list. For example, when people were talking a lot about Program or be Programmed a while back, it would have been fun to see that rise to the top.
It may generate some side-cash via the affiliate links - it would certainly be useful to us. We'll see how it goes anyway :)
The most recently mentioned list is a very good idea. I had something similar in mind, like a news-letter that would send the "most mentioned this month", so you can get the trends.
I think it could be useful for sure. Both a most recently mentioned list, and most often mentioned list. I'm more interested in the latter as it is more telling.
If making cash via an affiliate link is the goal, it would make sense to have the link to the user's localised Amazon site. I much prefer to buy from Amazon.co.uk as I'm UK-based so right now I'll just highlight-> right-click-> google the title and end up bypassing the affiliate link.
Well it's only a secondary goal, as I don't expect to make loads of money with it, but it would certainly be nice.
Being able to select your amazon store is planned as well (I'm in France so I totally understand your point :-)).
I choosed to ship without that though, to see if people like the site first or not. It will require a bit of work underneath to do well, things such as verify in the background if a book is actually available on amazon.co.uk, .fr etc to avoid sending the person to the wrong place.
On a slightly unrelated note, are there any UX/UI books that are targetted for programmers? I'm a complete noob with photoshopping and can't create a button to save my life. Working on side projects, this is really annoying.
This site is really a good idea. The Amazon links can get quite popular (I know from looking at my Amazon stats on @hackerlinks when I had the affiliate code inserted.)
This is really nice looking. I am working on a concept that encapsulates part of what you've done here and I would love to have a discussion with you. I'm not ready to launch yet, but will be in a couple weeks. I gotta get moving quickly and you provide good motivation!
For books published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, you should link directly to the publisher, in my opinion. PragProg.com sells DRM-free ebooks (in pdf, mobi, and epub) for cheaper than Amazon. They are a great value and I bet the PragProg folks keep more money this way, which is a good thing.
I dont know if there is an API for it or not but if you can get the Amazon rating of a book and display it on the book description page, it will be great. :)
On AZ ratings: I wrote that down. It's somewhat complicated because Amazon just made it a bit harder to embed that. It now has to be an iframe; the iframe url must be refreshed every 24 hours.
But overall this should be doable to, I'll see if I can make it usable.
Minor bug report: I did a search on xbox (hoping to see Hacking the Xbox) and the Kinect system came up -- you are probably scrubbing against Amazon and it came up.
I really liked the site, congratulations. Just because I am a stack freak, can you tell us more about your technology stack and how fun (or not) was to develop this?
Awesome. I recently ordered the well-grounded rubyist as I've heard great things about the book (though its on page #2 on your site). How long did it take you to complete the project?
Since I started freelancing in 2005 I've always deployed my stacks myself, learning gradually.
I always felt that doing it manually (even using well-written notes) then gradually home-baked tools was a loss of time.
I looked at chef more than a couple of times, waiting for the documentation to be more available, and for feedback from people I know.
I started using chef with the opscode platform, then went back to chef-solo as it really fits my needs already.
I'm using it for client work as well as for everything behind HackerBooks (including Rails app deployment without capistrano anymore).
The consequence is that I can boot a new ubuntu instance from scratch, completely configured with the whole stack (rvm, rails 3, passenger, nginx, solr, god, the properly configured crawler, data restored from a S3-like etc) in less than 15 minutes.
I will never go back to manual sysadmin (apart from small tips) - this really fits my way of working.
But it has been a time-sink to get in :)
Hope I replied to your question properly, if I didn't, ask again!
I'm a nobody, but consider making the pages less clicky and more product page-y, with the external references that provide the structure of your site constituting something of a "topics covered in this book." I think the references/links should be at least as prominent as the book blurb that currently serves to authoritatively describe the contents. My point is that the contents may actually be described (for sufficient numbers of refs) better by listing how people are actually recommending it, how its readers are using it. You could even implement a semantic parser that constructs a new book blurb based on the words and sentences in the recommendations and references. :) Anyway, good luck!
I wonder sometimes if it'd be worth creating a site that aggregates all the most useful and interesting information from social news sites like Reddit, HN, etc. like this site does for books on HN. I spent a long time finding all the best "life hacks" on Reddit the other day and really found some gems.
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for creating this!(and thank to the community for voting it up so i could see it)... I've been searching everywhere for book recommendations to help expand my knowledge of NLP and ML, then I suddenly click on this link and there it is! Great site!
Wow, good idea. I've browsed it this morning and it's an excellent website. Some things I might add is a link to the context of where the book was cited and also better categorization. (i.e. effective C++ in compiler book). But otherwise, amazing. Thank you
I'd really love a feature where people could submit exercise solutions for books that don't include them. I find exercises a lot more useful if I have a solution to compare against.
It's probably not too difficult, although my guess is you'll have to refeed your content. Unfortunately I've never worked with solr so I can't offer suggestions on where the modifications need to be made.
On parsing: it's actually a somewhat fastidious process that involve digesting a couple of GB of data, but here is the bottom line.
I look for amazon.com links in the content in general - I will broaden that to other publishers and full-text extraction too later on.
The content itself comes from the StackOverflow dump (for SO) and a mixture of a crawler allowed by PG + the previous database dump that was available at some point.
I extract all the books, quotes, users data from both, conform these into a common schema, and index the whole result.
Hope I answered your question properly - feel free to ask again if you'd wish.
On ranking: I know what you mean! I need to find some way to balance number of quotes with textual relevance, which requires me to dive a bit more into solr. I currently use textual relevance first because it gives more useful results so far.
For ranking, instead of textual relevance (which will be hard to achieve :/) and # of quotes (it can be easily hacked/spammed or new announced books will have a huge weight on the ranking), I suggest you to check timelines: if a book is quoted once/twice/... a month regularly, I'm pretty sure it worths reading it
I'll love to read about the architecture behind the site... yep, technically curious :)
I will offer a more advanced search with similar features, definitely!
On the architecture: I'll create a side-blog that will outline all I learned while working on this. It's been a crazy ride actually (especially because I started using chef and vagrant full speed).
Questions:
Apart from the "Quoted by" section, is any of the content from SO or HN displayed on the site? E.g. are any comments incorporated in the book descriptions, or are those written by you/wife?
Currently, no content from HN/SO is displayed apart from the Quoted by area.
We're not editing anything manually; what I will do is display the actual conversations in the "Quoted by" area, either when you click on a conversation.
I may ove the quotes above to make them stand out more.
Aaah - I see :) The book description is provided by the Amazon API itself; I'm not aware of any issue with publishing it if you are a registered API user.
Tweaking relevance is not super-easy with Solr. We designed IndexTank to have a very simple way to play with ranking. You can modify your formulas in your dashboard or through the API and see the results order change in real time.
I really love what you got here. I'd be happy to help you try out IndexTank and make it better. It would really take the Solr configuration burden off of you.
well I considered using IndexTank earlier on, especially because I didn't know yet how to deploy Solr. The relevance is mostly done already, I just needed to learn to use formulas :)
One thing that put me off is your cap in queries per day. The smallest paid plan (50k items in index) is capped at 1,000 queries per day.
Isn't that an issue for most sites ? Do people usually cache your results ?
The 1k cap for the 50k doc plan is old, we will be upping that significantly. What would be a number of queries per day that would make you comfortable?
That was what I was doing initially, but actually it has (big) sideeffects: if you search Ruby and get the most quoted book, you get... an ASP.Net book!
So I'm currently working on balancing textual relevance (eg: Ruby) with the number of quotes.
Site looks great - really great - on a macro level, but when you get down to it, it doesn't really have the content I'm looking for.
There's extreme misuse of the space on the page. When I was looking at Code Complete (a book I've been trying to get my hands on for a while), there is very little content about the book. The synopsis is cut off (!) and there are no reviews. But if you were trying to save space, why on the hells are there over 9000 books following in "quoted discussions"? You need to switch what you're truncating here. Also, I would suggest at least copying Amazon's ratings for some measure of book quality.
Hey - I understand what you mean, really. I really want to work on this specific page, and I'm actually frustrated to have released it this way :)
Here's what's planned:
- instead of cutting the book description like it's done currently, you'll be able to expand with a click
- I'll do the same on books and quotes, because hundreds of books are not useful in the "suggested books list", definitely
- and I want to focus more on getting the actual quotes to the front (eg: allow to read the actual quotes by HNers etc) because I feel it brings significant usefulness
I'm mixed on the Amazon ratings, both because recent API changes made it unpractical to really use the content (it's now an iframe that must be used as is, and refreshed every 24 hours), and because sometimes the reviews are fake as well.
So I'll try to bring more value by letting users know what people think on HN and SO.
Would these points make the site more useful to you ?
On the synopsis: well in some (too frequent) cases, the synopsis was just several pages long, so the related books and quotes were really, really hidden.
I need to find a better middle ground.
But in all cases, thanks for your critics, it will only help me make the site better.
I like it!
Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites.
Must be something about hacker books that's in the water. Lots of sites with lots of features and such means better resources for all hackers, plus lots of folks getting experiences doing stuff like this. Most excellent!
Since I've done this, I guess I should say something pithy or insightful. I think the trick is the navigation piece. I see you have categories -- that's probably a good place to start. I started with questions, you can go to my main page, click on the hacker-related question you have, and be presented with a sorted list of answers based on your experience. (see http://hn-books.com/ )
I'm not sure if questions are the way to go either, though, as there are a zillion questions hackers might ask. I'd still like to see somebody come up with some new ideas in this area.
I also ran into the "just what are hacker books, anyway?" question that we get over here all of the time. I finally said screw it, I'll just put things that I believe are hacker-related. But I don't think there's any easy answer to that one, either.
Outstanding site, though! I hope some of these other guys that have spoken to me will post what they've done as well.
Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites.
I'm not surprised. I've been working on my own half-baked version. Kudos to those of you who finished the baking.
Hi Daniel!
thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too.
I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :)
I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books!
In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!
Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know.
Cool work!
EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382
Well it deserves a blog post to describe how things work a bit, but roughly the things that help on the load are:
- fragment caching with redis/rails 3 (with some warmup script)
- the full search is handled by solr
- nginx and passenger are quite fast
I still need to make some work to compress the js/css together. The images themselves are served by Amazon.
On the size of the list: well I really have a bias toward "data aggregation". My two previous side-projects (http://www.learnivore.com and http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/) were already "ETL"-based.
I have another project where I will manually curate the list, though...
I think both approaches (data-driven or manually curated) have their pros and cons...
Glad you like it in all cases!
I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
Hehe - good point. We should chat later on yes, always good :)
Daniel, I really like your site and the curated list. However, I find the categories in HackerBooks.com much more easier to navigate than questions on the right side bar of hn-books.
Both of the sites still need to address the question, 'how do I present the categories without requiring too much navigation'. I know it's not sexy any more but how about tag-cloud per major category?
Thanks for the suggestion.
Actually I got that idea to try out experimental features under a /labs area. So I will give various features a go there. I can try out tags :)
Tag cloud might be best.
What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user.
The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn-books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like.
I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too.
When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now.
So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in.
EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn-books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=... Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)
Daniel, The ctrl-click feature is really cool. I hear you about feature creep. I am struggling with similar issues with what I am working on. I keep reminding myself Every piece of software I paid for recently is dead simple to use
Search facets are likely the best and fastest filtering mechanism for the users. It's pretty much just a straight products site with some recommendation engine. Just start faceting out the books by a few criteria, topic, length, proficiency level, etc.
One thing I'm considering is either solr facets or a structured auto-completion like soulmate [1].
What's your opinion on the later ?
[1] http://seatgeek.com/blog/dev/announcing-soulmate-a-redis-bac...
The autocomplete is fancy, but it involves: a) typing; b) spelling; and c) using the arrow keys and the enter key. Facets will let you get to the same place in a few clicks. You can always do both, though.
I'll give both a try in my labs. Thanks!
My wife and I made this site to make it easier to find tech-related books.
It's fairly simple so far and more features are planned.
I'm submitting early on to get some wider feedback. Thanks to all the HNers that reviewed this before today already!
Very useful and damn fast!
As quite a few have asked via the comment form: it's a nginx + passenger + ruby 1.9.2 stack, with solr for indexing, mongodb for data back-end, rails fragment caching in redis, and a warmup script to fill the caches.
That's a great stack. Any reason you went with Redis for the caching instead of memcached?
Well I'm more used to Redis, as I've used more than a couple of times with Resque (job processing in Ruby).
I started the crawler behind HackerBooks with Resque and Redis, but ended up saving some RAM by going back to a simple daemon. I reused Redis to provide the caching.
So well: I mostly used what I was used too.
Definitely makes sense if you're already using Redis for something else.
Sweet domain name. Did you have to shell out a lot for it?
I spent a bit of time on that, I must admit :)
In the end I paid 90$ for 3 years, which is OK I guess.
on that note, hackertext, hackermenu, hackerledger, hackerconventions, hackerelite, hackerplans, hackermanifest, hackerstatement, hackerplay, hackersection, hackervolumes, etc... all seem to be free. (shameless plug for nametoolkit.com - downvote me if you wish ;))
Those who code together, stay together!
Or was it the opposite?
We're going to work together on a SAAS product and became associates (after moving to the countryside).
Wish us luck :) (and communication, it's needed :-)
Thank you for building this. I admire the simplicity and elegance. Would be cool if the "Mentioned 2 times at Hackernews" was hyperlinked to the mention. Can this be done?
It will totally be done :)
Next iteration will be on making the navigation better, so that you can click on everything that's possible.
Interesting resource. Another related site would be DanielBMarkham's http://www.hn-books.com/ ...
Yes I know about Daniel's site, which was released while I was working on hackerbooks.com. I decided to keep working on it anyway, but it took me a fair amount of time to release.
I recently registered fivegoodbooks.com with the plans of trying to reduce choice aversion for technical books. i.e. the top 5 referenced books by the community to start learning a subject. This is really nice work, now I'm the one to have to decide if I keep working on it :)
Thanks for your kind words! Well I can see myself using both sites, really :)
That' what I learned from working on http://www.learnivore.com too - at the same time came out http://rubytu.be/, but I used both actually, and some people preferred one, some other the other.
I encourage you to ship anyway :)
Nice domain name... got me thinking. I wish there existed a community I respected that curated books on all topics. Like, I'd love to have fivegoodbooks extend from topics like Ruby and Python to Russian History and Urban Planning.
Another interesting idea maybe would be to map the annotations/bibliographies of all books, so I could start with books I've read and better see what kind of linkings exist. You could visually see the seminal works in a field and all the branchings. Maybe that already exists in some form?
Interesting. I had a shower idea(tm) one morning where the combination of a rating and user-supplied biographical data at the time of the rating (e.g. "I was a novice with Python when I read it") determined a book's effectiveness.
The idea was founded on the tendency that people are skill-biased when rating books. They might dislike a book for being confusing or too easy because it wasn't designed for them at the time of reading. This was an attempt to figure out which books were just bad, and which were only rated bad because they were read without proper experience (or too much).
Ultimately, using community data, a visitor would be able to discover a "bookpath" of great resources that syncs up with their level of skill.
I had something similar in mind for http://learnivore.com earlier on.
I wanted to create a community-edited wiki page providing a "training path" which would involve screencasts, books, articles.
I think it would really be useful actually.
Love the site and I intend to use it.
The wiki approach would be great if the data was laid out appropriately. Community-edited wiki might lead to a singular view of what a good path would be.
The benefit of a multi-axis rating system is that you could lay out data using different permutations and add/subtract inputs (e.g. rater's experience at time of rating/age/hell, maybe even personality type). I'm sort of modeling this off of robust scientific questionnaires.
It does seem to require some more user involvement, but nothing a fantastic UI couldn't fix.
Do you mean hackerbooks.com or learnivore ? (or both ? :-).
I would love to be able to build something like you describe, but I suspect it will be time consuming, that said!
I really like this idea, especially if the "bookpaths" converge.. i.e. the ruby path and python path converge to broader topics such as general software development (pragmatic programmer etc.)
"Which is the most quoted book"? or "What are the top 10 among most quoted books"? these were the questions going in my mind, while I'm browsing.
Just wrote that down, thanks!
I will probably come up with some kinds of list, and will definitely work on better sorting/filtering.
Useful, and also a neat way to make some side-cash via your affiliate link. I suspect I'll be checking this regularly.
One thing that would be really handy - or at least interesting - is a "most recently mentioned" list. For example, when people were talking a lot about Program or be Programmed a while back, it would have been fun to see that rise to the top.
It may generate some side-cash via the affiliate links - it would certainly be useful to us. We'll see how it goes anyway :)
The most recently mentioned list is a very good idea. I had something similar in mind, like a news-letter that would send the "most mentioned this month", so you can get the trends.
Would you find that useful ?
I think it could be useful for sure. Both a most recently mentioned list, and most often mentioned list. I'm more interested in the latter as it is more telling.
Overall I must work on making the data more exploreable, definitely.
My pet peeve is allowing to find books quoted by X, where X is some instance of someone I appreciated on HN :)
I think I will create a labs section with various experimentations like these, so people can try them out and see if it's useful.
Perhaps a combination, like a sort of TechMeme for books?
If making cash via an affiliate link is the goal, it would make sense to have the link to the user's localised Amazon site. I much prefer to buy from Amazon.co.uk as I'm UK-based so right now I'll just highlight-> right-click-> google the title and end up bypassing the affiliate link.
Well it's only a secondary goal, as I don't expect to make loads of money with it, but it would certainly be nice.
Being able to select your amazon store is planned as well (I'm in France so I totally understand your point :-)).
I choosed to ship without that though, to see if people like the site first or not. It will require a bit of work underneath to do well, things such as verify in the background if a book is actually available on amazon.co.uk, .fr etc to avoid sending the person to the wrong place.
On a slightly unrelated note, are there any UX/UI books that are targetted for programmers? I'm a complete noob with photoshopping and can't create a button to save my life. Working on side projects, this is really annoying.
I'd track the comments page. http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
In this respect you'll see new Amazon links every so often in: http://twitter.com/hackerlinks (the tweet will begin with Amazon) http://hackerbra.in/links
This site is really a good idea. The Amazon links can get quite popular (I know from looking at my Amazon stats on @hackerlinks when I had the affiliate code inserted.)
I didn't know about this page - I'm currently doing a 2-days late crawling, so this will help me make it realtime instead. Thanks!
I didn't know about hackerlinks either - just subscribed!
An Amazon link will look like: http://twitter.com/#!/hackerlinks/status/39864047344029696
Good luck!
Perhaps I should make an Amazon only Hackerlinks-style feed! Or you could have one coming from your site of new books as they're added!
Awesome site. Is there any way you can add a filter for "free" for ebooks?
Should be doable most likely. I added it to the backlog, thanks!
This is a great idea. Simple, yet effective, and well executed.
I wish I'd thought of it.
Thank you! Really glad you like it.
This is really nice looking. I am working on a concept that encapsulates part of what you've done here and I would love to have a discussion with you. I'm not ready to launch yet, but will be in a couple weeks. I gotta get moving quickly and you provide good motivation!
Congrats!
I'm writing to you right now :)
For books published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, you should link directly to the publisher, in my opinion. PragProg.com sells DRM-free ebooks (in pdf, mobi, and epub) for cheaper than Amazon. They are a great value and I bet the PragProg folks keep more money this way, which is a good thing.
For example http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/rails-for-net-developers-fac...
Should link to http://pragprog.com/titles/cerailn/rails-for-net-developers instead of Amazon.com.
That's a good suggestion (me being an avid reader of the pragprogs for a very long time).
I'll try to make more "publisher-specific" linking.
Awesome site! Verrrry useful for SOers and HNers.
I dont know if there is an API for it or not but if you can get the Amazon rating of a book and display it on the book description page, it will be great. :)
Thanks!
On AZ ratings: I wrote that down. It's somewhat complicated because Amazon just made it a bit harder to embed that. It now has to be an iframe; the iframe url must be refreshed every 24 hours.
But overall this should be doable to, I'll see if I can make it usable.
Thank you!
I found AZ ratings to be mostly useless, what would be better is the total number HN/SO points accumulated from all the recommendations for that book.
edit: not a mix, but separate points for each community
Mmm - a kind of book karma. Something like mixing the karma of the commenter with the heatness of the discussion etc ?
I think being able to filter on SO vs HN would definitely give different results, too.
The topics are sometimes fairly different on both sites.
Minor bug report: I did a search on xbox (hoping to see Hacking the Xbox) and the Kinect system came up -- you are probably scrubbing against Amazon and it came up.
Actually currently the search takes both the title and the description into account. The Kinect book has "Xbox" in its description.
Two conclusions:
- how the search works needs some explanation a bit!
- I will probably add an advanced search so you can specify exactly how you want the search to occur (eg: ignore the description....)
Thanks for your feedback!
I really liked the site, congratulations. Just because I am a stack freak, can you tell us more about your technology stack and how fun (or not) was to develop this?
Thanks! See http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2249639 (I will blog more about that later on as well).
What language/tools did you use to build it?
I used: ruby 1.9.2, ETL (extract-transform-load), vagrant, chef, mongodb, redis, sunspot/solr, rails 3, cucumber, rspec.
I plan to write a couple of blog posts explaining the "how" later on! It's been an interesting ride really.
Awesome. I recently ordered the well-grounded rubyist as I've heard great things about the book (though its on page #2 on your site). How long did it take you to complete the project?
It took much too long: around 300 hours as of today.
But a large part of it (the 2/3rds) was a learning exercise around chef and vagrant, which wasn't necessary to the project.
Of the remaining third, I've got around 70% for data processing in general and 30% on pure front-end code and design.
I really wanted to learn how to deal with sysadmin in a more productive fashion, so I took the plunge :)
would be interested to hear your learning experience in sysadmin.
Since I started freelancing in 2005 I've always deployed my stacks myself, learning gradually.
I always felt that doing it manually (even using well-written notes) then gradually home-baked tools was a loss of time.
I looked at chef more than a couple of times, waiting for the documentation to be more available, and for feedback from people I know.
I started using chef with the opscode platform, then went back to chef-solo as it really fits my needs already.
I'm using it for client work as well as for everything behind HackerBooks (including Rails app deployment without capistrano anymore).
The consequence is that I can boot a new ubuntu instance from scratch, completely configured with the whole stack (rvm, rails 3, passenger, nginx, solr, god, the properly configured crawler, data restored from a S3-like etc) in less than 15 minutes.
I will never go back to manual sysadmin (apart from small tips) - this really fits my way of working.
But it has been a time-sink to get in :)
Hope I replied to your question properly, if I didn't, ask again!
I like it! You might add links to the questions so people can see from the references what ground the book covers.
Glad you like it - it's planned really: you will be able to click on discussions, "quoter", author etc. I will make it more explorable.
I'm a nobody, but consider making the pages less clicky and more product page-y, with the external references that provide the structure of your site constituting something of a "topics covered in this book." I think the references/links should be at least as prominent as the book blurb that currently serves to authoritatively describe the contents. My point is that the contents may actually be described (for sufficient numbers of refs) better by listing how people are actually recommending it, how its readers are using it. You could even implement a semantic parser that constructs a new book blurb based on the words and sentences in the recommendations and references. :) Anyway, good luck!
thanks for the suggestion!
I wonder sometimes if it'd be worth creating a site that aggregates all the most useful and interesting information from social news sites like Reddit, HN, etc. like this site does for books on HN. I spent a long time finding all the best "life hacks" on Reddit the other day and really found some gems.
Well working on this definitely gave me other ideas. I think overall, the online data should be more easily searchable/sliceable, at a user level...
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for creating this!(and thank to the community for voting it up so i could see it)... I've been searching everywhere for book recommendations to help expand my knowledge of NLP and ML, then I suddenly click on this link and there it is! Great site!
Wow, good idea. I've browsed it this morning and it's an excellent website. Some things I might add is a link to the context of where the book was cited and also better categorization. (i.e. effective C++ in compiler book). But otherwise, amazing. Thank you
Thank you!
I plan to display the actual conversation in some way on the site itself, if I can. Lot of people told me it would be useful.
I will also work on some topic extraction, yes!
I agree about the context, very important to judge the value of the suggestion!
Absolutely - thanks for commenting!
Needs more Eloquent JavaScript.
Added to my todo list, thanks!
Love it! Nice clean and simple without the clutter of non-hacker type books!
I'd really love a feature where people could submit exercise solutions for books that don't include them. I find exercises a lot more useful if I have a solution to compare against.
Is it possible to sort in different ways? Am guessing it's sorted by latest recommendation at the minute?
I searched PHP and would like to see by # of recommendations...
Not yet! But I need to work on more sorting/filtering, definitely.
It's currently sorted (in that order) by 1) textual relevance and second 2) number of quotes.
Perhaps you should put a note about this on the result page, as currently it looks like it's random.
That's a great suggestion - note taken :)
You need to adjust your tokenization settings. --Searching for C, C++, and C# all return the same results right now.
Thank you - need to learn a bit more of solr to do that. I Will definitely to it!
It's probably not too difficult, although my guess is you'll have to refeed your content. Unfortunately I've never worked with solr so I can't offer suggestions on where the modifications need to be made.
No worries really - thanks already for giving the feedback.
I know for sure it can be done with some configuration tweaking, not even sure I'll need to reindex.
Thanks!
I knew exactly what your site offered and how to use it in the first 5 seconds. Awesome job, nice info layout.
I like it. I would love to see the comments without having to click through to hacker news or stack overflow.
It's planned! Definitely. You'll be able to read from the site as well as go to HN/SO if you wish (and for proper attribution, too).
Great tool. Will save me a few awkward google queries site:ac.uk "reading list" x etc
I am probably echoing many when I say: Great job! How can we rate individual books?
just curious... how do you parse (and find the titles) from SO and HN? Only checking from publishers/distributors links?
Keep the good work. I love it :)
My only suggestion is to offer a ranking and order the results by # of quotes
Glad you like it! Really :)
On parsing: it's actually a somewhat fastidious process that involve digesting a couple of GB of data, but here is the bottom line.
I look for amazon.com links in the content in general - I will broaden that to other publishers and full-text extraction too later on.
The content itself comes from the StackOverflow dump (for SO) and a mixture of a crawler allowed by PG + the previous database dump that was available at some point.
I extract all the books, quotes, users data from both, conform these into a common schema, and index the whole result.
Hope I answered your question properly - feel free to ask again if you'd wish.
On ranking: I know what you mean! I need to find some way to balance number of quotes with textual relevance, which requires me to dive a bit more into solr. I currently use textual relevance first because it gives more useful results so far.
Are you making any revenue from referrals?
The site is just released, so it's currently 0$ :)
We'll see how it goes.
Thanks :)
For ranking, instead of textual relevance (which will be hard to achieve :/) and # of quotes (it can be easily hacked/spammed or new announced books will have a huge weight on the ranking), I suggest you to check timelines: if a book is quoted once/twice/... a month regularly, I'm pretty sure it worths reading it
I'll love to read about the architecture behind the site... yep, technically curious :)
I will offer a more advanced search with similar features, definitely!
On the architecture: I'll create a side-blog that will outline all I learned while working on this. It's been a crazy ride actually (especially because I started using chef and vagrant full speed).
I'll post it back here in all cases.
Looks like a very useful site, thanks!
Questions: Apart from the "Quoted by" section, is any of the content from SO or HN displayed on the site? E.g. are any comments incorporated in the book descriptions, or are those written by you/wife?
Glad you like it!
Currently, no content from HN/SO is displayed apart from the Quoted by area.
We're not editing anything manually; what I will do is display the actual conversations in the "Quoted by" area, either when you click on a conversation.
I may ove the quotes above to make them stand out more.
Did I properly answer your question ?
Ok, so the book description is written manually?
Was justing wondering if the content might be touched by any copyright issues etc.
Aaah - I see :) The book description is provided by the Amazon API itself; I'm not aware of any issue with publishing it if you are a registered API user.
Ok, thanks! :-)
Tweaking relevance is not super-easy with Solr. We designed IndexTank to have a very simple way to play with ranking. You can modify your formulas in your dashboard or through the API and see the results order change in real time.
I really love what you got here. I'd be happy to help you try out IndexTank and make it better. It would really take the Solr configuration burden off of you.
Hi!
well I considered using IndexTank earlier on, especially because I didn't know yet how to deploy Solr. The relevance is mostly done already, I just needed to learn to use formulas :)
One thing that put me off is your cap in queries per day. The smallest paid plan (50k items in index) is capped at 1,000 queries per day.
Isn't that an issue for most sites ? Do people usually cache your results ?
The 1k cap for the 50k doc plan is old, we will be upping that significantly. What would be a number of queries per day that would make you comfortable?
That's a good news I think :)
I can't really tell yet, but my guess is that at least around the number of indexed documents could give a more usable subscription.
It would also be nice for people to know what happens if you go beyond the cap: do you offer some tolerance ?
We don't deny the service no matter how far beyond the cap you go. In case the cap is overpassed very often, we just contact the user.
Good to hear! Thanks for all those clarifications.
You should sort the books by the number of times they have been quoted.
That was what I was doing initially, but actually it has (big) sideeffects: if you search Ruby and get the most quoted book, you get... an ASP.Net book!
So I'm currently working on balancing textual relevance (eg: Ruby) with the number of quotes.
Thanks for your feedback!
Thanks for this amazing initiative. Looking forward to more features.
I welcome any feedback later on if you have ideas etc (use the form on the top of the site!).
Have you been inspired by the design/structure of Iconfinder.com?
Nope! I may have stumbled upon iconfinder once, but didn't use it as a model.
Do you mean you find the sites look similar ?
I wanted to keep the simplicity of Google if I could (hence the input/submit search). Otherwise no strict inspiration from any existing site afaik.
EDIT: I did a closer analysis out of curiosity and the common points are:
- the dual-color name
- a google-y search input+button
- the tagline with the number of items
- a similar green
Note that I definitely didn't use iconfinder as a model. I guess these are quite common characteristics.
I can't see any book details / list now. I haz error 500.
Thanks, I'm diving into it currently.
Works now.
I've reduced the number of passenger instances, in hope to keep things alive until I can upgrade.
Thank you for mentioning this!
Fixed - I was out of memory slightly, which sent solr and mongodb to the graveyard. I need to upgrade memory a bit.
Love it. Thank you.
This is a great idea, and executed well! Awesome!
Thanks for the kind words! Really glad you (and others) like it after the time I spent on it :)
i would appreciate a link to google books so i can preview the site.
Do you mean some kind of google books widgets or similar ?
I'm not aware of that, can you give more details ?
Wicked cool!
You make me happy :)
Site looks great - really great - on a macro level, but when you get down to it, it doesn't really have the content I'm looking for.
There's extreme misuse of the space on the page. When I was looking at Code Complete (a book I've been trying to get my hands on for a while), there is very little content about the book. The synopsis is cut off (!) and there are no reviews. But if you were trying to save space, why on the hells are there over 9000 books following in "quoted discussions"? You need to switch what you're truncating here. Also, I would suggest at least copying Amazon's ratings for some measure of book quality.
For reference: http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/code-complete-a-practical-ha...
Hey - I understand what you mean, really. I really want to work on this specific page, and I'm actually frustrated to have released it this way :)
Here's what's planned:
- instead of cutting the book description like it's done currently, you'll be able to expand with a click
- I'll do the same on books and quotes, because hundreds of books are not useful in the "suggested books list", definitely
- and I want to focus more on getting the actual quotes to the front (eg: allow to read the actual quotes by HNers etc) because I feel it brings significant usefulness
I'm mixed on the Amazon ratings, both because recent API changes made it unpractical to really use the content (it's now an iframe that must be used as is, and refreshed every 24 hours), and because sometimes the reviews are fake as well.
So I'll try to bring more value by letting users know what people think on HN and SO.
Would these points make the site more useful to you ?
Definitely yes, though I don't know why it would be necessary to trim the synopsis at all in most cases.
Thanks!
On the synopsis: well in some (too frequent) cases, the synopsis was just several pages long, so the related books and quotes were really, really hidden.
I need to find a better middle ground.
But in all cases, thanks for your critics, it will only help me make the site better.