The Oxford English dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which began publication in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, and provides ongoing descriptions of English language usage in its variations around the world.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2015–2019years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- (1) Lions on Unix (PDF and source), http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th...
"Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book. Despite its age, it is still considered an excellent commentary on simple but high quality code."
(2) Harper's dictionary of classical literature and antiquities (1898), 1750 pages, https://archive.org/details/harpersdictiona00peckgoog
(3) Oxford English Dictionary (1888), 15000 searchable page scans in a Windows app, https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407
- This is great, but an important caveat: this is actually “books for which the Amazon links are most frequently given” (maybe other sites too; the About page doesn't clarify), i.e. “most-linked books”, rather than “most-discussed books”.
For example, it says that on the TeX/LaTeX StackExchange, The TeXbook is mentioned only 6 times (https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-tex...), while in fact it's mentioned closer to 1357 times (https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=texbook). What appears to be true is that only 6 times someone bothered to link to Amazon when mentioning the book. Worse, for the English Language & Usage site, the Oxford English Dictionary does not even show up in the results (https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-eng...) while in reality it's mentioned about 7000 times by acronym (https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=oed) and about 1600 times by full name (https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22oxford%20engli...).
Under what circumstances will someone add a link when mentioning a book? I can think of two:
- The user thinks the book is not sufficiently well-known, so they add a link to Amazon or some other such site, for the readers to learn more.
- The user is trying to make money off affiliate links, or whatever.
For books that are well-known, or for the typical (lazy) user like me, books are going to mentioned and discussed without any link to anywhere being added (and often by acronym or nickname). So in that sense this site is actually likely to miss all the most frequently discussed books — the ones so well-known that no one bothers to link to anything when mentioning them (as in the examples above).
Shows that the hard part of data analysis is usually data cleanup (eliminating false positives and false negatives) and normalization (this one seems to treat links to different editions on Amazon as different books).
All that said, this site is useful nevertheless; thanks for making it!
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