I object to the site's notion that there is a "best" intro book in many areas, but I'd like to see listed on the site:
Griffiths' _Introduction to Quantum Mechanics_ is quite commonly used, even though it's a bit calculation-heavy. Beyond that or for more theory, perhaps Ballentine, or Dirac's original monograph, although neither is a very common text (if that's what someone's looking for, then Shankar [mid-level-ish], Cohen-Tannoudji, or Sakurai); Ballentine because it's new (relatively... 1998), and Dirac because it's old and it's what a lot of the mid-to-late 20th-century physics giants started from. Feynman's Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals is also a no-brainer because it's been republished and it's now a $12 Dover edition.
Grammar girl has an explanation [1] of the rule I've heard elsewhere and always followed---splitting it into "Jack's and Jill's" if they have separate and distinct things (so "Jack's and Jill's stories") and attaching the possessive to the compound entity if they share the item (so "Jack and Jill's story"). So in this case you're definitely correct about not splitting up the possession.
I haven't been able to find anything authoritative to explain what to do when there is a pronoun involved, though I believe the correct form would be "my wife and my..." and not "my wife and I's".
How do you differentiate between saying the project was a combined effort vs. talking about two distinct entities. eg., My wife and my projects were casualties of the war. Did the projects the two of you were working on destroyed in the war, or did you lose your wife and your projects?
Any chance there'll be a `Best free intro book` link of sorts to curate all the textbooks available in PDF form? Sometimes it's hard to find quality free content like `Linear Algebra Done Wrong.`
I find it helpful to see grammatical corrections; they make me marginally less likely to make the same mistakes myself. ("The key to learning is repetition, repetition, repetition, ...")
What authority is determining the "best" book for a topic?
What's your plan for adding entries for topics? I was expecting a "suggest a book" link, but that sort of assumes that "best" = "most popular" which may not be your criteria.
1. When one drinks one's tea from a cup and saucer, one extends one's little finger. I believe the colonists call this one's pinky. Not to do is unconscionable.
2. One does not say "Sorry, chap", but "Sorry, old chap".
3. As to the long coat without tails together with a topper, I am speechless.
I searched for C# / C Sharp and I got recommendations for K&R, a Book on Cognitive Science and a book on rock climbing.
Looks like it's missing reccos for Django, Dot Net, C#, etc. and some rather specialized stuff like neurology/neuroscience which I didn't really expect to be on the list anyways.
Good effort thought. I'm going to bookmark the site for future reference
1) Your suggestion for the best intro book on "ruby" assumes that Ruby = Ruby on Rails. I think many might disagree -- I'd differentiate and throw in a book on Ruby the language.
2) To the point of how the choices are made -- maybe institute some sort of voting system (Winner with X votes, runner-up #1, runner-up #2). I think it gives more credibility to the site if it's a community resource and the selections are based on something other than the site-owner's opinion.
Good idea and good weekend project! Also, excellent that you and your wife can work together on stuff like this - that's a great thing.
Overall, a good start, with a few rough edges. Searching on python resulted in "Dive Into Python" and "Learn Python the Hard Way", which are very good recommendations in my opinion. However, searching on "public speaking" referred me to a book on public radio, and searching on "programming" resulted in "Internal Server Error".
I am new to programming, currently teaching myself Python.
I have "Dive into Python" and have done most of "Learn Python the Hard Way".
I feel both of these are not ideal for beginners. Maybe they would be better for programmers new to Python.
I have found "Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science" by John Zelle to be the best reference so far.
Some of those topics are definitely in the site, but the search is only doing exact match right now. I'm in the process of getting stemming and some fuzzy matching turned on, so hopefully bikes will give you hits for bicycle in the near future.
Truly awesome work. Does it find the introductory book by googling it or they're all introduced by hand?. The funny thing is that my gf ain't letting me going on with my holiday project instead of helping me like yours haha
you seem to be missing entries for "auto maintainance", "goat herding", "cat herding", "sheep herding" and "sex". however a search for "maintainance of rare watches" turned up a bunch of books. the first hit was one on philosophy.
One of the rules the poster imposed was for the participants to name the other books they've read on the subject and explain why they thought their chosen textbook was superior.
I was randomly flicking through titles, just to see the scope of what you had in your database, and one flicked past that looked interesting - but by this time I had already hit "show another".
You may want to consider having a "previous" button there, but I completely understand that may take away from your design. Great job though!
Great idea. The first search I tried seemed pretty excellent (biology), but downhill after that. I did number theory, linear algebra, chemistry, topology, compilers. Only linear algebra gave something that looked reasonable.
Build up the database some and you might have something really useful.
I think this would be very useful to people who are new to a particular subject and do not have other means of guidance.
One way of building the database would be to request users for inputs if there is no data for the topic user is searching for.
I think it'd be really cool if I could see popular searches. Despite the fact that the title of the page is "...for any topic", I had no idea whether it was programming or what, though that may have been because my random book was K&R
How is "best" intro book defined? I typed in "economics" and I got a book on an introduction to Austrian economics. If the best economics textbook is one praised by Ron Paul and Ayn Rand, count me out.
Yes. I'm logging the searches and will add books for the missed topics. It started off with 250 or so, which was a fair amount to hunt down, but it looks like I have even more work to do.
I would consider tapping Quora for this unless you have a rolodex full of experts on such varied topics as carpentry, light infantry tactics, contra dance, or conflict de-escalation.
This particular site could alternatively offer a link to the freely available books (CC etc.) or at least notify about it. I don't know how the site works so I've no idea if it's possible without checking every license by hand, but it would be very, very awesome.
Michael, I'm Ignacio, from IndexTank, we exchanged some emails. Come to our website's live chat so we can think of a workaround for any problems you're experiencing with our whims :)
nothing returned for php and erlang (first tries for me)! Might be nice to have a list of topics references and maybe possibility to recommend some on topics not yet handled?
Erlang and OTP in Action is great for learning about OTP. It's not really the best introduction to Erlang the language itself. I'd recommend Erlang Programming by Cesarini AND Thompson for that. Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong is good as well.
This is a good idea, but have you thought about a crowdsourcing system? You could fill a lot of holes pretty fast and get some community input on which book is the best.
Nice looking site. It missed what I searched for (quantum mechanics) but it looks very nice.