Re: perl books

On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Uri Guttman wrote:

>   DR> Well, one thing you should realize is I want to make this a
>   DR> general books site, not just Perl.  First of all, I'd like to have
>   DR> other programming books listed.  Second, other tech books.  And
>   DR> finally, it'd be nice to just let people submit anything they're
>   DR> reading.
>
> that is news to me. hmm, the page is books.perl.org. maybe if the books
> are techie in the right way and are popular with perl hackers i could
> see it. so maybe a popular book could be added by consensus/voting,
> etc. i can see many books that would fit there. the use.perl thread has
> a list from acme and london.pm.

Its news to you cause I just came up with it when I posted to use Perl.

Basically, we should definitely have stuff besides books about Perl.  For
example, The Mythical Man-Month is a really good book for programmers to
read.  And maybe so is a book about designing robots.  And maybe one about
comic books (according to Dan Sugalski) and maybe I think that Noam
Chomsky's books are damn good.

You get the drift.  Basically, I think any sort of book should be allowed
(we just need lots of categories) but the the index page can still focus
primarily on the Computers->Programming->Languages->Perl category branch.

> this makes sense. so the primary thing we need is a DB with info on each
> book. do we want to start spec'ing out that now? my old page has a
> minimal set of info for each book. we can make a table which gives each
> book an id (which could be the isbn), has the primary facts about it
> (isbn, title, author, publisher, pages, etc) and other tables would have
> rows indexed by that book id (reviews, ratings, links, sample chapters,
> etc.)

Here's a basic outline:

  Book
  -------
  book_id
  ISBN
  title
  edition
  copyright_year
  page_count
  link
  publisher_id
  UNIQUE( ISBN )
  UNIQUE( title, edition )

  Category
  --------
  category_id
  category
  parent_category_id -- whee, self-joins!

  BookCategory
  --------
  book_id
  category_id

  BookLink
  --------
  book_link_id
  book_id
  book_link_type_id
  link

  BookLinkType
  --------
  book_link_type_id
  type -- cover, external reviews, excerpt, etc

  Author
  --------
  author_id
  name

  Publisher
  --------
  publisher_id
  name
  link

  User  -- may not be necessary, see below
  --------
  user_id
  username
  password

  UserBookRating
  --------
  user_id  - PK
  book_id  - PK
  rating -- 1-10

  UserBookComment
  --------
  user_id  - PK
  book_id  - PK
  comment


UserBookComment could also include reviews, or we could somehow
distinguish between comments ("OO Perl rocks") vs. longer reviews.


I've been talking to Pudge off-list about the idea of use Perl offering
its user info via XML-RPC or some other mechanism.  That would mean that
any .perl.org site could send users to use Perl to login, verify the login
cookie themselves, and request user info from use Perl.  I think this'd be
super-cool not only for a books site (if we decide not to do it as a Slash
plugin) but also for future .perl.org sites as well.

Other features...

- it'd be nice to be able to tag books you're interested in and come back
and see them later.

- links to online sellers?  partner programs?  I hate Amazon but maybe we
could link to multiple sellers.

- use use Perl's friend/foe info to prioritize reviews ("I want to see
what Damian thinks...") or change the weight of rankings ("I want all my
foes rankings to count at 10% of other rankings").



-dave

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