3 ms·
Ask HN: Requisite knowledge recommender for a given book, what's involved?
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:
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.
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?
It's similar to prerequisites in a college course catalog, but for individual books. For autodidactic folks, it could be very useful.
Is this an approachable problem? What does everyone think?
- revorad 15y agoI'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.
- gdubs 15y agoExcept, 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.
- revorad 15y agoI 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).
- gdubs 15y agoI 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.