One does not become more intelligent or wise simply by being born in a more modern age. The knowledge and understanding of previous generations is not absorbed through some default means.

No. To gain that knowledge we must read. We must actively seek out those shoulders before we can stand on them, and I for one am tired of stumbling upon profound wisdom that should have been part of my early education. Here’s what I’m doing about it:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtinfluential.html

I am building a master book list. Please let me know, either by comments here or via email, what you think should be included. The only criteria is that they should be must-reads — i.e. books that should, in your opinion, be required reading of all humans during secondary education and/or university. I’d prefer your favorite classics, but new books are fine too.

If you’re a geek like me, your books are a source of pride and joy. For those who love reading and learning, your book collection is something to be cherished and displayed. What follows is the best way I’ve found to inventory and search your collection.

Archiving

The best resource I’ve found for inventorying your books is LibraryThing.com. Using this amazing resource you can import your books and have them displayed beautifully, with all the information you could possibly want on each entry. The system uses a database that’s linked with Amazon as well as dozens of other sources.

The sheer number of options is staggering; you can tag your books, compare collections with other LibraryThing users, and even connect with others that have similar interests.

Searching Your Library

Being able to find what you’re looking for in a large collection is a must, and I’ve come up with a pretty cool way to search my library without even navigating to the main LibraryThing website. Using Firefox Quicksearches you can actually search your entire book collection right from the Firefox address bar. Here’s how you set it up:

1. Create a LibraryThing account and add some of your books
2. Go to your library and right-click inside your search field
   
3. Name the search and add a keyword for it, such as “books”
   
4. Once you’ve saved the bookmark, go into your bookmark management and edit the bookmark’s location field with the following url: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=danielrm26 &view=danielrm26&searchmode=Books&searchbox=%s&searchButton=Search
5. Replace my username with your own (red)
6. You’re done. Now, from Firefox’s address bar, type: books $searchterm You’re instantly taken to LibraryThing.com and shown all of your books relating to your searchterm. Repeat as desired.

Searching On The Go

Ever been in the bookstore looking at a particular selection and been unsure about whether you had it already? Well, LibraryThing puts and end to that as well.

Naviage to http://www.librarything.com/m from any web-enabled device, enter your username, and you can search your books before making the purchase.

Enjoy.:

I’ve posted about this before, but if you are a reader and don’t use LibraryThing.com — you’re missing out.

LibraryThing lets you archive, rate, and search your books, as well as compare your collections to those of others. It’s totally amazing. I just signed up for the life membership for just $25.

Seriously, go check it out.

LibraryThing.com

About LibraryThing.com

LibraryThing.com Zeitgeist

My Library

(** Oh, and the coolest feature? http://librarything.com/m lets you check whether or not you have a book from your phone/pda while you’re in the bookstore)

This site will let you select the book you have from Amazon and a number of other sources, and then maintain a list of what you own. Very cool stuff — especially for geeks like me that have over a hundred technical books and need to know exactly what we currently own to avoid buying duplicates. :)

http://www.librarything.com/

A while back I wrote myself a little online books database using L.A.M.P; it was utterly simple — a couple of text fields for the author and book title, and a way to list the current books in the library.

Well, just recently, someone commented on the post that I should use librarything.com. I just went and checked it out and it’s quite awesome.

If you’re into reading and/or are anal enough to want to know exactly what books you own, you need to check it out:

http://www.librarything.com

“The Rise of the Creative Class” (and “The Flight of the Creative Class”)

I group these together as they are obviously linked. They are most excellent, and like the others mentioned, they offer a different way of looking at things.

In specific, these deal with intellectual/creative talent, i.e. what it is, where it comes from, how it moves, and how it effects the United States.

Starting with “The World Is Flat”, I began reading and then demanding recommending that close friends read certain key books I’ve come across.

The idea is simple enough, and it differs significantly from a “book club”. In a book club (as I understand it) the group first collectively selecting a book, each person then reads said book, and then the group gets together at some point in the future to discuss it. The idea is quaint, to be sure, but both myself and my friends lack this sort of organization.

My technique is to find the books myself, read them, and if (and only if) the title is overpowering, I will recommend it to push it down the throats of my small circle of friends.

The idea is that if my selections are of high enough quality, the group that I’ve pushed these books onto will come to believe that their lives will in fact be improved by reading what I offer as worthy. The wrong thing to do, therefore, is to recommend something that’s mostly mundane, as that’s likely to undermine my ability to get them to read future titles.

Oh, and the other concept I’m doing for this project is actually buying the dead tree (non-digital) version of whatever title it is that I’m pushing. I don’t personally partake of them, as most of my book intake comes via audiobook while driving, walking, or working out, but I recognize that others enjoy the time spent with the legacy format.

So the idea is this — I find “must read” books, I consume them in digital format, and then I buy the hard copy and distribute it into the network. The person who gets it first is responsible for nothing except getting it to the next person in the list when they’re finished with it.

That’s the idea anyway.

The next book, by the way, is called “Freakanomics“, and it’s sick beyond all compare (I need to work on my hype language). The main concept with this book is that of economics in the true sense, i.e. using a set of tools to help figure out how things work. It goes about explaining how various things are thought to have happened vs. how they actually did — all supported by very strong arguments and excellent data.

So that’s the gist of it — I find cool stuff and I try my hardest to get my intellectual/geek buddies to read them via whatever means possible (including buying the book and putting it into circulation).

If you guys have any ideas for “must read” titles, do let me know. I am looking for those that are along the lines of “perspective altering”, i.e. books that help one change how they think about a great many things, or, at the very least “big” issues.

Ultimately, I’m in search of the unified theory of everything, and I’m simply gathering input at the moment. Any thoughts, comments, or other ideas are welcome.

I’m horny for books. I read them, I collect them, I admire them — especially those that are information security related.

Recently I’ve been running into a problem in the bookstore while browsing. I come across a title that looks intruiging and then realize that I’m not sure whether or not I already own it. It’s a horrible feeling, really. The old me says buy it anyway and give it away if it’s a duplicate, but the new me demands that I check first to see if I own it.

The obvious solution is to be able to check, from the bookstore, whether or not I actually already have a given book. So I made a list of my books in vi, sorted it for easy searching, and put it on the site.

Now, whenever I’m in doubt, I can conjure the page over my Blackberry and check to see if I have the damn thing before I buy it. :) W00t.

http://dmiessler.com/mybooks

Next I’ll complete my previous project of manually building a database to do this using LAMP. I did it already, but my table structure was primitive and the only functions I had were viewing all books and adding new books. What I’d ultimately like to be able to do is search by any field, e.g. author, edition, subject, etc.

Another thought I’ve been throwing around is the concept of tagging along the lines of Delicious. In other words, take each book and give it a series of tags. Then, just as with Delicious and Flikr, I could search for all books with a given tag (or even multiple tags). As an example, it’d be cool to call up all books of mine that have to do with database, or all my Python books, etc. Anyway, this’ll work for now.