
Ask HN: Want a Hacker Book App? - DanielBMarkham
Hi guys,<p>Yesterday I wrote up a list of books that I pulled from HN using Google.<p>Today it was posted here and became popular for a bit.<p>Looking at the comments, I have to agree that there were a lot of good books that got left out. I mean heck, at the end of the day the results came back however Google sorted them, and I only did the first few pages of search results. It wasn't much fun taking all day to type in books, but from the voting here it looks like it had some value to you guys.<p>So, I guess I would be a completely bad HN'er and wouldn't have learned anything from being here if I didn't ask you guys the obvious question: should this become a small app instead of just a blog entry? I was thinking something along the lines of RottenTomatoes, only for startup books. I could harvest data from several technical sites and aggregate in one place.<p>I can't promise to listen to any of your opinions (so what's new there?) but I'm interested in what the community thinks about the app. I know there's a boatload of other book-type apps out there, but nobody doing the meta-harvesting thing like I describe. Plus it's something I could hack together in a week, month tops. And I'm working on very similar code right now for my other project, code which would drop quite nicely into something like this. Might make for a nice testing platform.<p>Worthwhile useful idea -- something that people want -- or just another wannabe web application?
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SkyMarshal
One of my favorite websites is the now-defunct <http://programmingbooks.org>.
It only exists in archive.org now:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323890>

I for one think it would be a great idea for you to take the concept and
expand it beyond programming books to startup and other hacker-useful domains.
Like a Reddit/HN/Stackoverflow for books on software, startups, diy web
business, etc. Heck, even other stuff like fiction and philosophy, since those
get some discussion here too.

I'd frequent it.

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dreyfiz
This is a fantastic idea. Sorry you didn't get more feedback.

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smiler
Sounds good.. I've recently had the same idea myself and am considering doing
something with it. I've just moved house though so I need to get that sorted
out in the next couple of weeks but then get on with it.

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DanielBMarkham
FYI, I did a follow-up post with stats.

[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great-
hac...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great-hacke.php)

Looks like it could be a hobby. Not sure if anything more than that, though.
But enough to play around with the idea some more

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timruffles
I'd say the rate of worth-while books being published is so low it's best
served by a list - and thanks again for that list!

