Sun 11 Feb 2007
Programming Books - The Best Programming Books Ranked by Programmers
Posted by Matt under PostgreSQL, Profile, Ruby on Rails
ProgrammingBooks.org is a great resource for any developer/programmer looking for the best of breed books on a particular coding area. All the books are user ranked, kind of like a highly targeted Digg, minus much of the social networking elements. The simple act of adding a book as one of your favorites increases it’s ranking. Users can comment on any book in the system, not just ones they mark as their favorites.
Like most programmers, Shane had read many programming books over the years. ProgrammingBooks.org grew as a result of a blog post about his favorites.
I’ve read a lot of programming related books over the years and I’ve always thought about writing an article on my blog about the books I thought helped me the most. I finally wrote it and the response was amazing. The article made the front page of digg and del.icio.us, and got roughly 50,000 readers in the first 24 hours. I noticed that a lot of people disagreed with my choices and had very strong opinions on various other books. I started thinking about a way to allow everyone to pick their top 5 programming books and programmingbooks.org came out of that.
Shane built the entire site in about a month using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. The user interface takes advantage of Yahoo! UI Framework. The design of the site is sparse, yet clean and efficient. As more of a developer then a designer, Shane struggled with the look of the site, especially the logo. This is certainly an area I can relate to, but with a site targeting programmers, under design can have it’s advantages.
Shane attended college at Texas A&M, but fell just short of graduating (the second developer since I’ve started this site who didn’t finish college). He currently work at Frog Design.
As of Jan 21st ProgrammingBooks has 193 registered users, who have ranked 613 books. The process of ranking a book is dead simple. First you select the category of the book. The users is then presented with five text fields where they can enter the title of the book. If the book is in the system the field will auto complete. Books that aren’t in the system must be added through a separate form before they can be ranked.
ProgrammingBooks.org is a great starting point when looking for the consensus best programming book in a particular area.
Popularity: 16% [?]
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February 11th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I didn’t find any real bugs while checking out ProgrammingBooks.org. I did have a few suggestions though:
1) The confirm message after creating an account is very low contrast compared to the background color.
2) It would nice to have a view that shows all the books you’ve ranked across all the categories.
3) It would be cool to have a view http://www.programmingbooks.org/mattc that shows all the books I’ve ranked and commented on. I’m not talking full social networking w/ buddies, but being able to click on a users name and see all the books they’ve ranked would probably keep people on the site longer.
4) Also the ranking page doesn’t really show whose ranked a book, just the comments and the number of users who ranked it. I would list all the users who ranked the book and tie in the functionality listed above.
5) A small bug: I ranked Webmaster in a Nutshell (2nd Edition), then I pulled removed it. The detail page for the book correctly states “0 Rankings”. The Web Development category page however still say “1 Ranking”.
6) Right now I could rank the same book in multiple categories. This could make the site a bit messy, especially if books don’t clearly fall into one subject.