
Show HN: HackerBooks.com - thibaut_barrere
http://www.hackerbooks.com/
======
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
prpon
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?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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=...](http://hn-
books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=3&QC=2) 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)

~~~
prpon
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_

------
thibaut_barrere
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!

~~~
TobiasCassell
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?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
It will totally be done :)

Next iteration will be on making the navigation better, so that you can click
on everything that's possible.

------
swombat
Interesting resource. Another related site would be DanielBMarkham's
<http://www.hn-books.com/> ...

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

~~~
bg4
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 :)

~~~
aridiculous
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

~~~
aridiculous
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

------
KishoreKumar
"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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Just wrote that down, thanks!

I will probably come up with some kinds of list, and will definitely work on
better sorting/filtering.

------
benwerd
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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 ?

~~~
aik
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

------
tejaswiy
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.

------
adrianwaj
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.)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

~~~
adrianwaj
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!

------
instakill
Awesome site. Is there any way you can add a filter for "free" for ebooks?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Should be doable most likely. I added it to the backlog, thanks!

------
dansingerman
This is a great idea. Simple, yet effective, and well executed.

I wish I'd thought of it.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Thank you! Really glad you like it.

------
codeslush
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!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I'm writing to you right now :)

------
nathanlrivera
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...](http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/rails-for-net-developers-facets-of-
ruby/1934356204)

Should link to <http://pragprog.com/titles/cerailn/rails-for-net-developers>
instead of Amazon.com.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

------
chintan100
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. :)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

~~~
quan
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

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

------
davidjhall
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

------
soapdog
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?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Thanks! See <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2249639> (I will blog more
about that later on as well).

------
HackrNwsDesignr
What language/tools did you use to build it?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

~~~
HackrNwsDesignr
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?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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 :)

~~~
HackrNwsDesignr
would be interested to hear your learning experience in sysadmin.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

------
rhizome
I like it! You might add links to the questions so people can see from the
references what ground the book covers.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

~~~
rhizome
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!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
thanks for the suggestion!

------
marknutter
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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...

------
NnamdiJr
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!

------
d0m
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

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

~~~
o1iver
I agree about the context, very important to judge the value of the
suggestion!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Absolutely - thanks for commenting!

------
marijn
Needs more Eloquent JavaScript.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Added to my todo list, thanks!

------
techarch
Love it! Nice clean and simple without the clutter of non-hacker type books!

------
thurn
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.

------
Jem
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...

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

~~~
troels
Perhaps you should put a note about this on the result page, as currently it
looks like it's random.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
That's a great suggestion - note taken :)

------
tallanvor
You need to adjust your tokenization settings. --Searching for C, C++, and C#
all return the same results right now.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Thank you - need to learn a bit more of solr to do that. I Will definitely to
it!

~~~
tallanvor
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.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

------
Sakes
I knew exactly what your site offered and how to use it in the first 5
seconds. Awesome job, nice info layout.

------
mcn
I like it. I would love to see the comments without having to click through to
hacker news or stack overflow.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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).

------
conjectures
Great tool. Will save me a few awkward google queries site:ac.uk "reading
list" x etc

------
tomrod
I am probably echoing many when I say: Great job! How can we rate individual
books?

------
dmarinoc
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

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

~~~
dmarinoc
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 :)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

------
gauravgupta
You should sort the books by the number of times they have been quoted.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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!

------
krat0sprakhar
Thanks for this amazing initiative. Looking forward to more features.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I welcome any feedback later on if you have ideas etc (use the form on the top
of the site!).

------
iconfinder
Have you been inspired by the design/structure of Iconfinder.com?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

------
savramescu
I can't see any book details / list now. I haz error 500.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Thanks, I'm diving into it currently.

~~~
savramescu
Works now.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I've reduced the number of passenger instances, in hope to keep things alive
until I can upgrade.

Thank you for mentioning this!

------
blparker
Love it. Thank you.

------
jwomers
This is a great idea, and executed well! Awesome!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Thanks for the kind words! Really glad you (and others) like it after the time
I spent on it :)

------
lefstathiou
i would appreciate a link to google books so i can preview the site.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Do you mean some kind of google books widgets or similar ?

I'm not aware of that, can you give more details ?

------
mikecaron
Wicked cool!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
You make me happy :)

------
TheSOB88
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...](http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/code-complete-a-practical-handbook-of-
software-construction/0735619670)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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 ?

~~~
TheSOB88
Definitely yes, though I don't know why it would be necessary to trim the
synopsis at all in most cases.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
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.

