Show HN: HackerBooks.com

http://www.hackerbooks.com/

by thibaut_barrere • 15 years ago

351 140 15 years ago

hackerbooks.com

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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!

sgruhier• 15 years ago

Very useful and damn fast!

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

As quite a few have asked via the comment form: it's a nginx + passenger + ruby 1.9.2 stack, with solr for indexing, mongodb for data back-end, rails fragment caching in redis, and a warmup script to fill the caches.

albedoa• 15 years ago

Sweet domain name. Did you have to shell out a lot for it?

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

I spent a bit of time on that, I must admit :)

In the end I paid 90$ for 3 years, which is OK I guess.

taylorbuley• 15 years ago

Those who code together, stay together!

Or was it the opposite?

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

We're going to work together on a SAAS product and became associates (after moving to the countryside).

Wish us luck :) (and communication, it's needed :-)

TobiasCassell• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

It will totally be done :)

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

dmarinoc2• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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.

HackrNwsDesignr4• 15 years ago

Are you making any revenue from referrals?

dmarinoc2• 15 years ago

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 :)

wolfhumble3• 15 years ago

Looks like a very useful site, thanks!

Questions: Apart from the "Quoted by" section, is any of the content from SO or HN displayed on the site? E.g. are any comments incorporated in the book descriptions, or are those written by you/wife?

nachopg3• 15 years ago

Tweaking relevance is not super-easy with Solr. We designed IndexTank to have a very simple way to play with ranking. You can modify your formulas in your dashboard or through the API and see the results order change in real time.

I really love what you got here. I'd be happy to help you try out IndexTank and make it better. It would really take the Solr configuration burden off of you.

rhizome4• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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.

rhizome4• 15 years ago

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!

instakill• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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

chintan100• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

gauravgupta• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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!

benwerd2• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

joe_fishfish• 15 years ago

If making cash via an affiliate link is the goal, it would make sense to have the link to the user's localised Amazon site. I much prefer to buy from Amazon.co.uk as I'm UK-based so right now I'll just highlight-> right-click-> google the title and end up bypassing the affiliate link.

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Well it's only a secondary goal, as I don't expect to make loads of money with it, but it would certainly be nice.

Being able to select your amazon store is planned as well (I'm in France so I totally understand your point :-)).

I choosed to ship without that though, to see if people like the site first or not. It will require a bit of work underneath to do well, things such as verify in the background if a book is actually available on amazon.co.uk, .fr etc to avoid sending the person to the wrong place.

adrianwaj2• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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!

adrianwaj2• 15 years ago

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!

d0m• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

jwomers• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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

dansingerman• 15 years ago

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

I wish I'd thought of it.

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Thank you! Really glad you like it.

tallanvor2• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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

tallanvor2• 15 years ago

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.

savramescu2• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Thanks, I'm diving into it currently.

savramescu2• 15 years ago

Works now.

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Fixed - I was out of memory slightly, which sent solr and mongodb to the graveyard. I need to upgrade memory a bit.

marijn• 15 years ago

Needs more Eloquent JavaScript.

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Added to my todo list, thanks!

Jem• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

HackrNwsDesignr4• 15 years ago

What language/tools did you use to build it?

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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.

HackrNwsDesignr4• 15 years ago

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?

KishoreKumar• 15 years ago

"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_barrere62• 15 years ago

Just wrote that down, thanks!

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

marknutter• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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...

soapdog• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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

swombat• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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.

bg42• 15 years ago

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 :)

mikecaron• 15 years ago

Wicked cool!

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

You make me happy :)

krat0sprakhar• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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

techarch• 15 years ago

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

TheSOB882• 15 years ago

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...

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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 ?

TheSOB882• 15 years ago

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

blparker• 15 years ago

Love it. Thank you.

thurn• 15 years ago

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.

codeslush• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

I'm writing to you right now :)

DanielBMarkham4• 15 years ago

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.

dionidium• 15 years ago

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.

I'm not surprised. I've been working on my own half-baked version. Kudos to those of you who finished the baking.

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Hi Daniel!

thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too.

I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :)

I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books!

In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!

DanielBMarkham4• 15 years ago

Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know.

Cool work!

EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382

prpon2• 15 years ago

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?

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion.

Actually I got that idea to try out experimental features under a /labs area. So I will give various features a go there. I can try out tags :)

DanielBMarkham4• 15 years ago

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=... 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)

rhizome4• 15 years ago

Search facets are likely the best and fastest filtering mechanism for the users. It's pretty much just a straight products site with some recommendation engine. Just start faceting out the books by a few criteria, topic, length, proficiency level, etc.

lefstathiou• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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

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

nathanlrivera• 15 years ago

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...

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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.

iconfinder• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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.

davidjhall• 15 years ago

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_barrere62• 15 years ago

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!

mcn• 15 years ago

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

thibaut_barrere62• 15 years ago

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).

tejaswiy• 15 years ago

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.

tomrod• 15 years ago

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

Sakes• 15 years ago

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

NnamdiJr• 15 years ago

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!

conjectures• 15 years ago

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

Show HN: HackerBooks.com

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