Shane Sherman

I got a lot of feedback from my previous article, The 5 Books that Every Programmer Should Read. As with all “top x” lists, many people disagreed with me, and had strong opinions about other books I didn’t list. This gave me the idea for:

ProgrammingBooks.org

Features include:

• Ability to rank your own top 5 books you think every programmer should read, as well as your top books based on category. So you can rank your top 5 favorite ruby books, or your top 5 favorite algorithm books.
• View aggregated lists of ranked books based on category and sorted by rank.
• Ability to add comments and discuss books
• Ability to add books to the site directly from amazon via an isbn or aisn

Future Features:

• Ability to search for books based on ranking, price, etc
• Ability to add additional information to the book details like additional links, reviews, etc
• View interesting statistics generated based on user data. I want to show the differences in rankings based on years of programming experience.
• Ability to view profiles of other programmers and see their specific rankings

Current Issues:

• You can’t edit your profile or change your password. I’ll be fixing this today most likely
• Adding books that are not on amazon is possible, but it’s akward and needs a lot of work

Anyways, I hope that this site will be useful and help programmers find the best programming books. There’s really only 1 source for finding quality books, and that’s looking through all the amazon ratings/rankings, which can be a real pain. There’s not a whole lot of books ranked currently, so it’s not very useful yet, so help me out, and rank your favorite programming books!

If you have any suggestions please leave a comment or e-mail me at shane.sherman (at) gmail.com. I tried my best to cover every category of programming books, but I know I missed a lot. If you have ideas for other categories, add a comment letting me know.

Tags: Books, my apps, ProgrammingBooks.org