I recently registered fivegoodbooks.com with the plans of trying to reduce choice aversion for technical books. i.e. the top 5 referenced books by the community to start learning a subject. This is really nice work, now I'm the one to have to decide if I keep working on it :)

Nice domain name... got me thinking. I wish there existed a community I respected that curated books on all topics. Like, I'd love to have fivegoodbooks extend from topics like Ruby and Python to Russian History and Urban Planning.

Another interesting idea maybe would be to map the annotations/bibliographies of all books, so I could start with books I've read and better see what kind of linkings exist. You could visually see the seminal works in a field and all the branchings. Maybe that already exists in some form?

Thanks for your kind words! Well I can see myself using both sites, really :)

That' what I learned from working on http://www.learnivore.com too - at the same time came out http://rubytu.be/, but I used both actually, and some people preferred one, some other the other.

I encourage you to ship anyway :)

Interesting. I had a shower idea(tm) one morning where the combination of a rating and user-supplied biographical data at the time of the rating (e.g. "I was a novice with Python when I read it") determined a book's effectiveness.

The idea was founded on the tendency that people are skill-biased when rating books. They might dislike a book for being confusing or too easy because it wasn't designed for them at the time of reading. This was an attempt to figure out which books were just bad, and which were only rated bad because they were read without proper experience (or too much).

Ultimately, using community data, a visitor would be able to discover a "bookpath" of great resources that syncs up with their level of skill.

I had something similar in mind for http://learnivore.com earlier on.

I wanted to create a community-edited wiki page providing a "training path" which would involve screencasts, books, articles.

I think it would really be useful actually.

Love the site and I intend to use it.

The wiki approach would be great if the data was laid out appropriately. Community-edited wiki might lead to a singular view of what a good path would be.

The benefit of a multi-axis rating system is that you could lay out data using different permutations and add/subtract inputs (e.g. rater's experience at time of rating/age/hell, maybe even personality type). I'm sort of modeling this off of robust scientific questionnaires.

It does seem to require some more user involvement, but nothing a fantastic UI couldn't fix.

Do you mean hackerbooks.com or learnivore ? (or both ? :-).

I would love to be able to build something like you describe, but I suspect it will be time consuming, that said!

I really like this idea, especially if the "bookpaths" converge.. i.e. the ruby path and python path converge to broader topics such as general software development (pragmatic programmer etc.)