
Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites - BookInsider
https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/
======
gallerdude
This is off-topic at best, but I find it interesting that with certain
websites which won't be named, as a college student I have basically unlimited
access to all the books, movies, and songs I'll ever want for the rest of my
life (or until anti-piracy measures get smarter).

I used to wonder what it'd be like to be a rich celebrity, and be able to buy
literally everything you want immediately. And now that I can do that in a few
fields of commerce, it's turned out to be not very exciting at all. It's good
to know that if a book looks interesting, I can have it, but it's not nearly
as exciting as I would have expected it to be. I'd imagine celebrities knowing
that they can own any house or car is kind of underwhelming.

~~~
beefield
And if you compare to anything but a handful of recent decades, you not only
can afford to buy pretty much anything that only the very richest have had
access to, you can easily buy things that even the richest have hardly even
dreamed of. And yes, still most people find their lives pretty underwhelming.

~~~
gallerdude
The weird part is how obvious this seems. Obviously, the things we have don't
make us significantly happier. But if we lived our lives with this simple
assumption, our lives would look infinitely different.

~~~
jdavis703
Expensive things I own or rent that make me happy:

* Having my own house (no random roommates or bad family members)

* Having a computer and cellphone

* Having a bike

* Having house plants

These things cost money, and also make me happy. I think the key though is to
buy and own things that will bring you joy. If maintaining house plants is a
chore you’re doing to keep up with trendy design, it won’t bring happiness. If
having a house full of greenery helps to you to feel more connected with
nature it will bring joy. Figure out the things you own that bring happiness,
and don’t buy the rest.

~~~
okr
That sounds just like me. I wonder if you buy apps. There is so much value for
me in cell phones (hm, or rather small computers), that i feel, even if it
seems like i do not spend too much, that i get a huge bargain with these small
devices: weather, nav, music, video, news, chat, photo, etcetc...

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jasode
A friendly fyi to BookInsider: I noticed that your amazon urls have
_"?tag=bookinside-20"_ and therefore you need to clearly disclose on your
website that your book links are part of the Amazon Affiliate program.

If you don't, someone could report your website to Amazon and get your account
banned.
([https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+ban+seller+account+ta...](https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+ban+seller+account+tag+affiliate+links+disclose))

~~~
BookInsider
Thank you for your FYI, I have updated the Amazon info into the webpage now!

~~~
dclusin
Seems like you're doing things above board, kudos. I was wondering, since this
a site catering to entrepreneurship (among other subjects), if you wouldn't
mind sharing your revenue numbers from your participation in amazons referral
program. As a programmer find these sorts of lists helpful. I wonder what kind
of action you're seeing for a top post on HN :)

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theoh
Odd that "Assertiveness at Work" comes top of the RPG books list.
[https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-
rpg...](https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-rpg/)

I looked into it, and it's just one user recommending it over and over:
[https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/2100/sardathrion](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/2100/sardathrion)

~~~
BookInsider
Are you saying that it is a bad thing to count mentions over and over if they
are all from a single user?

~~~
profquail
Maybe not a bad thing, but seems less of a strong signal of “goodness”
compared to a book recommended the same number of times by different users.
You might consider capping the number of times you consider recommendations
for one book from a single user to something reasonable, like 3. That way you
get more of a crowd consensus as to what’s really good.

------
kperry
Working Effectively with Legacy Code is the best Software Engineering book I
have ever read. Most authors will show you very trivial examples, but Feathers
shows detailed examples and an almost formulaic way to make your code
testable. You can read and memorize SOLID principles, but he shows you how to
_do_ SOLID principles.

~~~
james_s_tayler
I was revisiting that book again last night briefly and was having a chuckle
at some of the example code in Java (I assume it's Java?) before some of the
more modern features came into the language and thinking "yep, using iterator
and .next() to do your loops sure is legacy code alright!". It smelt like Java
1.4

Good times.

------
svat
This is great, but an important caveat: this is actually “books for which the
Amazon links are most frequently given” (maybe other sites too; the About page
doesn't clarify), i.e. “most-linked books”, rather than “most-discussed
books”.

For example, it says that on the TeX/LaTeX StackExchange, _The TeXbook_ is
mentioned only 6 times
([https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-
tex...](https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-tex/)), while
in fact it's mentioned closer to 1357 times
([https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=texbook](https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=texbook)).
What appears to be true is that only 6 times someone bothered to link to
Amazon when mentioning the book. Worse, for the English Language & Usage site,
the _Oxford English Dictionary_ does not even show up in the results
([https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-
eng...](https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-english/))
while in reality it's mentioned about 7000 times by acronym
([https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=oed](https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=oed))
and about 1600 times by full name
([https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22oxford%20engli...](https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22oxford%20english%20dictionary%22)).

Under what circumstances will someone add a link when mentioning a book? I can
think of two:

\- The user thinks the book is not sufficiently well-known, so they add a link
to Amazon or some other such site, for the readers to learn more.

\- The user is trying to make money off affiliate links, or whatever.

For books that are well-known, or for the typical (lazy) user like me, books
are going to mentioned and discussed without any link to anywhere being added
(and often by acronym or nickname). So in that sense this site is actually
likely to miss all the most frequently discussed books — the ones so well-
known that no one bothers to link to anything when mentioning them (as in the
examples above).

Shows that the hard part of data analysis is usually data cleanup (eliminating
false positives and false negatives) and normalization (this one seems to
treat links to different editions on Amazon as different books).

All that said, this site is useful nevertheless; thanks for making it!

~~~
dorkwood
I tried to do something like this years ago by scraping websites in a
particular niche. I decided that I wanted to count a book any time it was
mentioned -- not just when it was linked to. As a junior-level programmer,
however, it was a problem I couldn't solve.

How do you determine whether someone using the word "mindset" is talking about
the book by the same name, or just using the word?

~~~
svat
It's a hard problem; one you can't ever fully solve. You need to accept some
degree of error, as pretty soon you'll hit the point where every incremental
improvement requires you to basically double the amount of effort. (You can
start by incorporating some signals like whether the word/title occurs in
uppercase, whether it has any special formatting like italics, whether the
author's name occurs nearby, and so on.)

But what you can do is be very up front about the error: you can be explicit
about your methods and describe their modes of failure, give examples of some
of the things you might miss, try to analyze your error and how bad it is, and
so on, and finally leave it to the reader to decide how seriously to take your
results. (If you see some recent papers they include a “Threats to Validity”
section, e.g. Section 3.4 here:
[https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/papers/seip18.pdf](https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/papers/seip18.pdf))

------
chrononaut
I was perhaps somewhat amused to see that a large portion of the books under
"Science Fiction & Fantasy" are actually non-fiction or reference books about
the backstories / physics / realism behind various Science Fiction & Fantasy
universes / worlds.

------
BookInsider
Thanks everyone for your suggestions and testing of my site. I will keep
improving it. I just create a patreon link to my site so hopefully that can
become a progress log.

[https://www.patreon.com/BookInsider](https://www.patreon.com/BookInsider)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
There is an error on [https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-
on-mat...](https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-math/)

Line 223: \u can only be followed by a Unicode character sequence.

On Safari 12.0.3.

~~~
BookInsider
Thank you for letting me know! It has been fixed now (will be updated in a few
minutes), and I also add twitter for the Book Insider site:
[https://twitter.com/Book__Insider](https://twitter.com/Book__Insider)

------
chalst
I see that under the algorithms tab, Knuth's TAoCP is ranked 13th equal,
together with 4 others.

~~~
BookInsider
Thank you for noticing that! So far I haven't dealt with books with the same
number of discussions. I will probably sort the tied-rank books with sentiment
score.

------
vidanay
Is there an implicit understanding that these are all "good" discussions?

~~~
wiremaus
Not necessarily. Some of these might be universally hated.

I bet all of them are pretty interesting, however.

~~~
BookInsider
It is true that some of the discussions actually hated some books. So I tried
to use the sentiment score to characterize discussions.

------
YesThatTom2
The serverfault.com list includes 2 editions of the same book. If you collapse
them, it would make room for another deserving book.

Tom Limoncelli Co-author of TPOSANA

~~~
timb07
The book is so good it deserves to be listed twice. :)

------
4thaccount
I noticed electrical engineering had nothing in the power systems category, so
these lists are still pretty sparse.

~~~
BookInsider
Some of these links are actually other products (not books) on Amazon. We
remove these products. Still need to improve the UI so sparse lists look
nicer. Thank you for pointing that out!

~~~
4thaccount
No problem. I'm sure each category can be endlessly fleshed out. It just
looked weird that there was a lot of EE not covered.

------
billfruit
Surprised the English stack exchange doesn't reference the OED that often.

~~~
svat
How they count mentions is not mentioned anywhere, but it appears they only
count links to Amazon. Obviously no one is going to link to Amazon when
mentioning the Oxford English Dictionary. In that sense, they may be missing
the true most discussed books, the ones so well-known that no one bothers to
link to anything when mentioning them.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
that's disappointing. i was also hoping to see books that have commonly-used
nicknames, like "the dragon book", get counted.

~~~
floatingatoll
I was unable to determine what you mean by “the dragon book”. Is that related
to the recent Dragon movie that was in the Oscars? I don’t imagine you mean
The Magicians book 2. Maybe you mean “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (terrific
dragon on the cover!) but I’m honestly not really sure what you mean otherwise
:(

While you could answer my above questions directly, I don’t need them
answered; I’m just trying to make the point that “nicknames” cannot be easily
correlated with a book when you scale up to “the entire word of readers”.

~~~
gburt
He almost surely means Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred
V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman [1]... or one of the
earlier versions of the book with different authors and titles ;-).

As was common for 80s software textbooks, this was nicknamed for the
distinctive image on the cover.

But (and now your edit clarifies that this indeed was your point), perhaps
your point is just how difficult it would be to automatically disambiguate
nicknames in diverse communities like StackExchange.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniques,_and_Tools)

------
jeanluchayes
I hope Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is on that list.

------
forgotmypw2
consider making your site accessible to nonjs users, please. currently, the
book lists are not visible.

~~~
BookInsider
Thank you for your suggestion! I didn't thought about that. But in the next
step, I will definitely make changes to consider nonjs users!

------
updateYourMind
Is it sad that the most popular book is about working with a legacy codebase?

~~~
YesThatTom2
The preface of that book IIRC is about the fact that 90% of dev time is spent
reading code trying to find where to insert your new code (the other 10% of
your time).

