Revisiting the Book Reviews Section

[luis.roca]

A quick search for 'Reviews' shows this has been brought up a few times here in PM Discuss but I thought it was worth presenting again.

The Book Reviews section is currently ordered alphabetically by title and includes a link to every review of each book reviewed in one long list. A few thoughts (again not original but maybe useful):

1. List each book once. *(With the exception of different editions.)
2. Link to a list of the user submitted reviews for each book.
3. Have a list of categories at the top. Similar to the Categorized Questions and Answers and Tutorials sections.

Aside from the numerous Perl books on the list, covering different levels of expertise and areas of interest, there are also non-Perl texts that span a wide number of categories. Simply separating Perl from general computing/programming books would be helpful. It would also be useful to have those two categories broken down further into areas of interest and/or level of expertise. For example:

Learning Perl

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced

General Programming

• Algorithms
• Databases
• Web

I don't know how many other monks use this section but I'd love to be able to refer to it more often. I think, with a few changes, it could be improved and look a little more like the rest of the site.

Update (Same day): Edited statement on how the reviews were listed for clarity.

[BioLion]

I agree - making information more accessible is always a good thing!

I also like the functional area suggestion, it is not dissimilar to bioconductor's "use Bioconductor for..." organisation, which is helpful is you want to know how to do something and need to be guided into the right direction.

Just so I am not accused of bias, another good model would be the cpan search landing page!

Another thought would be a "review request", as in "has anyone read this book? is it any good?" situation. then again, maybe this is more of a SoPW thing, as in "i want to get into databases, where can i learn more?" type of question...

[planetscape]

I really love this idea.

I would love to see the Book Reviews section reorganized along the lines of Tutorials, with a new order of Monks (Bookworms?) "in charge," as Pedagogues are now in charge of Tutorials.