Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites

Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by svat on Sunday March 03, 2019 @12:18PM (#19295524)

How they count mentions is not mentioned anywhere, but it appears they only count links to Amazon. Obviously no one is going to link to Amazon when mentioning the Oxford English Dictionary. In that sense, they may be missing the true most discussed books, the ones so well-known that no one bothers to link to anything when mentioning them.

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Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by woodrowbarlow on Sunday March 03, 2019 @12:55PM (#19295725)

that's disappointing. i was also hoping to see books that have commonly-used nicknames, like "the dragon book", get counted.

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Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by floatingatoll on Sunday March 03, 2019 @01:14PM (#19295848)

I was unable to determine what you mean by “the dragon book”. Is that related to the recent Dragon movie that was in the Oscars? I don’t imagine you mean The Magicians book 2. Maybe you mean “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (terrific dragon on the cover!) but I’m honestly not really sure what you mean otherwise :(

While you could answer my above questions directly, I don’t need them answered; I’m just trying to make the point that “nicknames” cannot be easily correlated with a book when you scale up to “the entire word of readers”.

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Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by gburt on Sunday March 03, 2019 @01:54PM (#19296074)

He almost surely means Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman [1]... or one of the earlier versions of the book with different authors and titles ;-).

As was common for 80s software textbooks, this was nicknamed for the distinctive image on the cover.

But (and now your edit clarifies that this indeed was your point), perhaps your point is just how difficult it would be to automatically disambiguate nicknames in diverse communities like StackExchange.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniq...

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Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by pm215 on Sunday March 03, 2019 @01:59PM (#19296113)

Google manages to scale up fine in this case -- searching for 'the dragon book' gives the correct answer as its first hit (via wikipedia)...

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Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by BookInsider on Sunday March 03, 2019 @01:04PM (#19295775)

well, this is difficult to do ... We will need to create a nickname dictionary for all books in the first place, right?

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Re:Top books discussed on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exc... by BookInsider on Sunday March 03, 2019 @01:03PM (#19295770)

You are right. I didn't think about that, and I will think of a way to get all actual mentions in the next step. Thank you for the suggestion.

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