

Ask HN: Requisite knowledge recommender for a given book, what's involved? - gdubs

I had this idea, and thought I'd share it with the community. Given the scale, it seems like it would be ideal for open source:<p>I was reading a book recently and realized that in order to approach it, I needed to do a lot of prior reading. It was a book on Schoenberg and 12 tone classical music and it was full of references to a ton of other music and writings and works that I'd never heard of before.<p>So, it made me think: what's the app for telling you what books and subjects you should have a handle on before reading a given book?<p>It's similar to prerequisites in a college course catalog, but for individual books. For autodidactic folks, it could be very useful.<p>Is this an approachable problem? What does everyone think?
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revorad
I've thought of making something like this, but can't think of an elegant
approach. One starting point might be to show closely related books in
chronological order of publication.

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gdubs
Except, better books on a given subject could easily come along at a later
date. Time of publication doesn't seem like a good basis for grouping.

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revorad
I didn't mean to use time of publication as an indicator of quality, but
instead to find out material which has more chances of being foundational
(because it came before).

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gdubs
I get you, but I just think that prerequisite knowledge is often not going to
be chronologically published.

I was thinking along the lines of the Netflix recommendation engine based on
topics covered in a text and the overall 'grade level' of the book. There's
been some good work done in the latter, eg "The Art of Plain Talk" which has a
system for analyzing the grade level of a given piece of writing.

