Re: Creating a Book Recommendation page. Community feedback appreciated.
Andrew Thompson wrote:
Daniel Pitts wrote:
After the recent accusations from Twisted that I'm conning innocent
newbies into spending money, ..
<dws>*
It is probably all those links you put to 'free' books
where the book arrives with an invoice, or worse,
the ones you post to links where the page simply
reports 'ha ha u bank account has bin emptyd!!!'
</dws>
That just might be why. Too bad that account got seized by the gov'ment.
..I've decided that I really *should* be
getting a cut for all the referring I do. ..
You might get a rude shock as to just how many
referrals produce a pitiful amount of money.
I wasn't expecting to retire off this :-)
[snip]
Right now I only have two books: Refactoring, Fowler and Java
Concurrency In Practice, Goetz. I do plan on adding more books, and
improving on the explanation of the books. If anyone has a "must
read" book they'd like to recommend to me, let me know and I'll see
about acquiring it.
** OK. A couple of points:
- I am not a big fan of books, and generally rely on web
based documents myself.
- If I encounter a poster who seems *set* on books, I
will first point out the JavaDocs, the Java Tutorial and
Bruce Eckel's freely downloadable 'Thinking in Java'
.before linking to TechBookReport's list.
<tangent>I don't think I've read an up-to-date Thinking In Java. (I have
a copy from 98 I think). I'll check out the free one.</tangent>
<http://www.techbookreport.com/JavaIndex.html>
- The reason I will link to TBR's list is that I get the
strong impression they (being rather passionate
about books) have *personally* read every one listed,
and the reviews are their own, so have a consistency
to them. Also TBR's reviews tend to provide enough
detail for the end reader to decide whether the book
is suited to *their* immedate purposes, perhaps
despite a high rating by TBR.
That is also my goal. The two books I have listed there are books I
have read through. Its just been too-long of a weekend (celebrated my
Wedding on Saturday).
For those who are interested the site is http://books.virtualinfinity.net/
Nice colors, but I think this concept of 'negative space'***
in a web page is 'very last millenium', and more a sign of
web developers that either:
a) Do not understand how to write resizable pages - or
b) Want to extort money for 'updating' the site every time
the 'average screen size' changes.
The page should be resizable. The negative space is simply a margin
(check the CSS), and this page is hand updated by me, so obviously I'm
trying to extort money from myself _as well_ from newbies.
Once you get more than 'a couple', it would probably
also help to add some HTML anchors so the OP can
be directed to *specific* books - ideally anchors whould
be alllowercase, with no '-', '_', ' ' or orther funny characters.
Some people prefer descriptive anchors like ..
<http://books.virtualinfinity.net/#javaconcurrencyinpractise>
.but for the sake of brevity, I often *also* add
a number based anchor, like..
<http://books.virtualinfinity.net/#1>
I was actually thinking of going a step further and having the "index"
page as well as a page dedicated to each book and/or subject. That way
I could link to books.virtualinfinity.net/refactoring
*** The gaps down either side of the page. The only
reason my own pages will have a gap down the left
side of the page (below the links) is that I cannot be
bothered filling it with ads (at this moment).
BTW -
effecient -> efficient
dispell -> dispel
Thanks. It's late at night, and I don't have a spell-check plug-in for
VIM :-) I should run a spell-check on the whole thing.
I think the sentence..
"If you work in a J2EE container, Swing GUI application, .."
.should be more like..
"If you work in a J2EE container, or on a Swing GUI application, .."
.or..
"If you work in J2EE, Swing GUI development, .."
(I do not like the word 'application' since it implies
'not applet' within the Java context.)
Hadn't thought of that. Actually, it is relevant to AWT programs as
well. I should correct that, thanks.
For those this offends, feel free to simply not click on the link.
I recognise the help you are trying to provide. As Lew
might be heard saying - "I consider you to be one of
the 'white hats'".
Help? I thought I was extorting money. Dangit. Got my wires crossed
again :-).
* DWS - Dripping with sarcasm.
Thanks for the feedback. I suppose the *best* way to make money from
selling books is to either become a publisher. The next best way would
to be a writer. I'm more likely to become the latter :-).
Thanks,
Daniel.
P.S. I'm using a new newsgroup interface (Thunderbird with my ISP's
NNTP, instead of Google Groups), please let me know if anything *weird*
happens. On the plus side, I can actually see some messages that google
indexed but didn't store (or can't retrieve.)