Adding the edition info would be good, but it is meaningless without saying how many editions exist (is it the first edition of one, or the third edition of six?), which would require some system of updating as new editions are released. Someone would have to be constantly checking to stay current. As a for instance, the 2nd edition of The Perl Cookbook was released in August, 2003, and the 2nd of Mastering Regular Expressions in July. Simply noting that both reviews were of first editions wouldn't reveal that.

Having said that, I still think adding edition info is important. And, I would love to see the author(s) of the book as well as the author of the review. With the redundancy in title names, it's pretty hard to distinguish one from another sometimes. Something like "Title, Edition, Author(s), Year of publication, and Publisher" would go a long way towards uniquely identifying the object under discussion. Of course, just including the ISBN would do that, too, but it isn't very "human readable".

At the same time, "Mastering Algorithms with Perl by splinky" might be a great review (in fact, I think it is), but someone who knows neither splinky nor the fact that the book in question is:

"Mastering Algorithms with Perl by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi & John Macdonald ISBN 1-56592-398-7 Copyright 1999, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc."

could be forgiven for passing it up just from ignorance (that is, lack of information).

I love books and I love the book reviews. Even in their present state, I think they are one of the most valuable resources in the monastary. Anything that would improve their usablility would be a "Good Thing."

In reply to Re: Re: Book Reviews getting unmanageable by ackme
in thread Book Reviews getting unmanageable by PhilHibbs

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