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Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites
- chalst 8y agoI see that under the algorithms tab, Knuth's TAoCP is ranked 13th equal, together with 4 others.
- BookInsider 8y agoThank 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 8y agoIs there an implicit understanding that these are all "good" discussions?
- wiremaus 8y agoNot necessarily. Some of these might be universally hated. I bet all of them are pretty interesting, however.
- BookInsider 8y agoIt is true that some of the discussions actually hated some books. So I tried to use the sentiment score to characterize discussions.
- BookInsider 8y agoIf you check the sentiment score of a discussion from my site, it shows you that whether the discussion is good or bad.
- 4thaccount 8y agoI noticed electrical engineering had nothing in the power systems category, so these lists are still pretty sparse.
- BookInsider 8y agoSome 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 8y agoNo problem. I'm sure each category can be endlessly fleshed out. It just looked weird that there was a lot of EE not covered.
- BookInsider 8y agoHi can you be more specific about which tags you are referring to? I checked those tags but all of them have some books. I didn't find any tag in EE with nothing listed.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kperry 8y agoWorking 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 8y agoI 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.
- gallerdude 8y agoThis 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.
- knolan 8y agoi suspect it has more to do with experiences. It’s not necessarily about accumulating stuff, digitally or otherwise but about experiencing the the best of these various things. So nicer homes, better food, fancier transport. They’re probably less concerned about knowledge than you and I and are probably more interested in imposing their own views on the world than the rest of us.
- czr 8y agoLikewise. The primary limit on media consumption is, of course, time available to consume it, and piracy doesn't change that. I think the one interesting place is w.r.t textbooks. Piracy means that I can efficiently pull up multiple textbooks on any given subject, as well as textbooks on any pre-requisite subjects. The size and cost of most textbooks would make that untenable otherwise.
- beefield 8y agoAnd 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 8y agoThe 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.
- theoh 8y agoOdd 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 8y agoAre you saying that it is a bad thing to count mentions over and over if they are all from a single user?
- profquail 8y agoMaybe 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.
- theoh 8y agoI don't know what changes, if any, would stop this problem from occurring. It just jumped out as a case of a book at the top of a list that doesn't really address the topic in question. It does seem like an outlier in the data, right? Maybe, though, there's some hidden validity to the implied idea that assertiveness is a key issue in the RPG community.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoIf you yourself were an RPG hero and you're trying to save the world and that's your job then perhaps assertiveness at work is exactly the right book for you?
- billfruit 8y agoSurprised the English stack exchange doesn't reference the OED that often.
- swimfar 8y agoOED = Oxford English Dictionary
- svat 8y agoHow 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 8y agothat's disappointing. i was also hoping to see books that have commonly-used nicknames, like "the dragon book", get counted.
- BookInsider 8y agowell, this is difficult to do ... We will need to create a nickname dictionary for all books in the first place, right?
- floatingatoll 8y agoI 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”.
- 8y ago
- jeanluchayes 8y agoI hope Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is on that list.
- jasode 8y agoA 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+tag+affiliate+links+disclose https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+ban+seller+account+ta...)
- BookInsider 8y agoThank you for your FYI, I have updated the Amazon info into the webpage now!
- dclusin 8y agoSeems 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 :)
- forgotmypw2 8y agoconsider making your site accessible to nonjs users, please. currently, the book lists are not visible.
- BookInsider 8y agoThank you for your suggestion! I didn't thought about that. But in the next step, I will definitely make changes to consider nonjs users!
- svat 8y agoThis 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-english/ https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-eng...) 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%20english%20dictionary%22 https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22oxford%20engli...). 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!
- BookInsider 8y agoThank you for your input! I will keep improving the site based on your suggestions and advice from others. I add a patreon link to my site so hopefully that can become a progress log. https://www.patreon.com/BookInsider https://www.patreon.com/BookInsider
- 8y ago
- updateYourMind 8y agoIs it sad that the most popular book is about working with a legacy codebase?
- YesThatTom2 8y agoThe 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).
- chrononaut 8y agoI 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 8y agoThanks 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 8y agoThere is an error on https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-math/ https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-mat... Line 223: \u can only be followed by a Unicode character sequence. On Safari 12.0.3.
- BookInsider 8y agoThank 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
- YesThatTom2 8y agoThe 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 8y agoThe book is so good it deserves to be listed twice. :)