I need your help with the direction of NK Book Reviews
Happening at NK Book Reviews
I have been making some more changes over at www.nkbookreviews.com. Some of them are visible changes, and some are still behind the scenes for future feature releases. I am excited about the culmination of data I have related to all of the books, authors, and publishers. Here's some of the content that has been added recently:
I recently finished reviewing Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. Here is a short snippet of the review:
There are many pieces of the puzzle that fit together to portray the big picture, and it is up to us as web developers to make sure all of those pieces are in place for the end users. Some of these things include accessibility, usability, copywriting, information architecture, design, and more. That's what this entire book is about - putting the pieces of the puzzle together to create a useful, usable, search engine friendly, and ultimately, findable website. Read More
I recently received, and am currently reading, Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan. I am completely new to the programming scene on Mac OS X and iPhone development, and this has proven to be a very good read so far. It is geared towards beginners, so the first few chapters have been programming basics in the context of Objective-C. I am very impressed at the author's ability to gradually show shorthand techniques, by first showing the base of how you can achieve different tasks (IE: If/Else and Ternary operator). This is a tough book to put down, and since I am completely new to this - I often times find myself in front of the computer running through the different exercises at the end of each chapter. I look forward to finishing this book.
Outside of regular content, I have also integrated what I think to be some very useful advertising pieces. On some pages you will now see information from Authentic Jobs and SidebarAds. A big thank you to both Cameron Moll and Jonathan Snook for coordinating this with me. My goal with these are simple. I have had several people in the past contact me about different jobs or services related to web development. Some looking for jobs in the industry, and still others looking to get different work done. I have done my best to point people in the right direction, and most of the time it would lead back to Authentic Jobs. Initially they are using the default embedded advertisements, but I am working behind the scenes now on the Authentic Jobs API to integrate the job postings with more targeted content related to book and review detail pages. I will keep you posted as more comes of that. I hope that some will find these useful as just another part to their education process.
A search index is currently being integrated. This was a feature I left out at the beginning, because it didn't quite feel ready to me. I didn't want to just settle with a LIKE search on all of the information. I wanted to create a more useful and targeted search index. This obviously takes time, but I think there will be many benefits to having it done right.
Resources
I have been in conversation with Lachy about his recently released website, Uncoverr.com. We have found that we both share some of the same goals and visions, and I look forward to collaborating with him in some different ventures in the future. He has a great vision for that website, and is actively getting more content to fill it out. He recently did an author interview with the one and only, Jonathan Snook (of the newly re-designed snook.ca), and also posted a review of JavaScript: The Missing Manual.
Communication
For those who don't know, I have also added a Twitter feed for nkbookreviews. I did this to supplement other avenues of communication. The twitter timeline will be used for several things:
- Let you know when a review is posted.
- Keep you updated on books I am reading.
- Snippets and quotes I find helpful or interesting from the books.
This will be used two ways. As I write to this feed, I will be pulling all of my thoughts back into the website to harvest with some other pieces of data.
Next, I have been thinking about getting an email newsletter in place. Is this something you would subscribe to and find useful? I see it containing some of the same things as the twitter timeline, only on a less frequent posting schedule. Used as more of a brief overview of activity, an email dashboard of sorts.
Oops!
I have noticed recently that some URLs need to be updated for RSS subscriptions at the site. I will be updating these items this weekend to assure they get redirected to their proper spots. I apologize for those who have received errors with the feed while trying to subscribe. For now, the main feed to subscribe is http://www.nkbookreviews.com/reviews/rss.xml
I need your help
As I have gathered all of the different data for the reviews site, I am trying to find some of the different useful ways I can roll into useful features. My goal from the beginning was to keep the site as clean as possible, and make sure that each piece I added was useful and served a purpose. This meant that at launch time I actually removed several features, as I wasn't sure they were quite ready. Some of those were related to taggings, nested categorizing, and intended audiences, others were related to meta information from the books.
So, my question for you is: When trying to find the right book on a certain topic, what do you look for in a review and extra information that help you make your decisions? Be sure to let me know in the comments, or email me directly at nate@theklaibers.com.
7 Comments Add your comment
beth January 17th, 2009
Specifically regarding technical books, I am primarily interested in knowing how useful a book will be to someone at my skill level. Is the book geared towards a beginner starting at zero, a novice, or someone well versed in the subject?
Then I want to know will this book provide knowledge I use in my day to day dealings with the topic? For example, if it's a CSS book is it going to tell me new things I'll use every day when coding or something I'll only pull out once in a blue moon?
If the book covers something in depth I want to know if there are working examples or links to example files.
Lastly I want to know how credible the author is, if it's a book about design I want to know if the author themselves is a great designer.
Ron Hopper January 18th, 2009
I have a snap-judgment criteria for tech books if I'm somewhat familiar with the subject matter. I quickly scan the book to see if it commits certain faux pas (e.g., an HTML book that has a whole chapter devoted to animated gifs).
I think this translates to the idea of continued relevance. I don't want to own (or even read) a book that has no meaningful and relevant perspective on the subject matter, but simply regurgitates a lot of how-to info that I could have looked up online.
So I'm interested in whether a book is well motivated from the outset and answers the WHY of the topic far more than the HOW.
Nate Klaiber January 18th, 2009
RE: Beth
You have given me a lot of food for thought, and inspired some different ways to start showing different pieces of data. For instance, I have the intended audiences being stored (per the publisher). However, I think I need to put it in a more common language to speak to those looking for books.
The credibility of the author is also a really important part, and has always been for me - I can't believe I hadn't thought about this before now. Now I have a challenge to find out how I can 'rate' an author as a credible source. This one might be tricky - but should be fun nonetheless.
RE: Ron Hopper
You have given me some ideas for a mini-index of sorts, based on some of the criteria that both you and Beth have mentioned. I agree with you. It's like when I open a Rails book and see someone referring to a model directly in the view, I start to inspect a little closer and check the index of the book to see if things are actually quality and not just quantity of pages. I need to find a way to establish a quality/density index to find some of these things.
Thank you both for the feedback so far - it really has given me a lot to think about, especially in light of the data I already have and how I can connect them to possibly come to different conclusions.
Brendan January 19th, 2009
I'm right with Beth on the relevance (actually I think that was the topic of one of our very first conversations at a CWSA metting).
A "who this book is for" blurb or ranking would make the reviews extremely helpful. For an example I'm working on relearning JavaScript from the ground up, the first paragraph of your review of DOM Scripting is what made me buy the book. Because I am someone who has "used it in the past but would like more knowledge."
In regards to the author, I noticed you don't even have the author listed on the actual review, it took me a bit to find the "view this book" link in the sidebar that has all the details. I also expected to find that info (or the Amazon page or official book site) by clicking on the thumbnail of the over.
Lastly, comments. I think comments are good for a review site because it 1) I can see who else liked/disliked the book. They can endorse your review or give you feedback on why they disagree (or tell you how much you suck if it ends up on Digg).
Excluding the last one, seeing other people say "thanks for the review, I've got a good handle on the html/CSS stuff but not that good with JS. This book was perfect for me" is huge. I know you so I take your recommendation on it's face; those that do not know you may not.
So to summarize and actually answer your question: When trying to find the right book on a certain topic, what do you look for in a review and extra information that help you make your decisions?
1. Is this the right book for my level of knowledge?
2. Who wrote it? Have I heard of them/do they know their stuff?
3. Did other people find the book useful? What did they take away from it?
Nate Klaiber January 19th, 2009
RE: Brendan
I am definitely working on a good way to visualize the intended audience. I feel like it's too 'flat' right now - by just saying 'Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced'. I think it needs more context to be useful.
Also looking on ways to better qualify the author of the books. Some of this will require user help, but at the same time I think it will need to be moderated as some people could get off topic (see any Amazon reviews as an example). I don't want people commenting and saying 'This book sucks, it didn't have anything about MySQL in it' - when the book clearly didn't even mention talking about MySQL. There are more examples of this, but I want to make sure things stay neat and tidy in the process.
I think if I were to open it up to some comments/ratings, I would need to keep a close eye on things. Anonymity leads to knee-jerk responses and ratings, so maybe requiring a little more to the process for rating or commenting. Not sure how I want to go about this just yet - but it's the reason neither are there from the beginning.
Dana Kashubeck January 25th, 2009
So far, I'm agreeing with everything everyone has said. Very helpful, huh?
I agree with Brendan that comments tend to be important. When I'm looking for a book on a particular subject, I do look at the ratings on Amazon and flip through the reviews. If I see one that says, "This book sucks. It didn't cover MySQL at all!" and the book is a CSS book, then I can easily dismiss their rating of 1 star.
One thing that I tend to look at before purchasing a book is whether it will be a good reference book in the future or not. If a book is great for an overview of a topic, or only a one-time read, then I don't need to plunk down the money on it; I can get it from the library. But if a book has lots of good solid information, then I want to be sure I purchase my own copy for future use. In techy things, everyone tends to view every book as a good reference source. But I've several volumes that I purchased because they seemed to cover "everything" and were recommended as reference tomes, but it in fact only superficially covered the topic. So, as part of a review I think it would be helpful to see something like:
This is a great introduction to Javascript and will really build your understanding from square one in the first read.
OR
This book covers Javascript in-depth and will be an invaluable reference in the future.
I think some of your reviews do mention if a book is a good reference book or not, but maybe put that information in the Book Details, too.
Josh Walsh February 12th, 2010
The thing that matters most to me is recommendations from friends. That being said, your review is enough to make my decision. But, for someone who doesn't know and trust you, piping in reviews from someplace like the Amazon API might be useful.