Reading Recommendations From @naval

A list from @naval talks/podcasts and tweets.
It’s mainly for my personal usage when I’m buy new books (or ordering some from the library).

• Poor Charlie’s Almanac: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. This one is the biggest book (for real) you will have in your library. Find a special and strong shelf for it.
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I wrote about here in the past.
• The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle (@EckhartTolle)
• The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson
• Incerto Series by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb): All 5 books are great but not an easy read. I had to re-read some parts in the books again and again and I’m still not sure I got to the bottom of the idea(s).

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Rank Your Book Collection

I love books. It is due to my parents, that put in me from the age of 4 or 5 this passion to the written word. It might be (also), my literature teacher from high school, that took the only subject I really didn’t like (yep… I enjoyed math, physics and computers but hated literature) and made his course a pure adventure full of joy. I remember lots of moments when you finish a book but keep thinking on the subjects/point of views/heroes years and years after the 4th time you reading it. In a way, my kindle is a wonderful device but I still really like to hold a ‘real’ book.

Last weekend, I’ve decided to ‘sort’ my mobile (=kindle) books. Since I’ve had them (all 1,073) on one big folder, I wrote this little script that build a list of their names and then use amazon to get their rating. From here, the path to a spreadsheet with the data is very short. Now, I know what are the best ones, by harnessing the ‘wisdom of the crowds’.
Happy reading!

Here is the code (or if you like a better version try it on github)

 

/**
 * Description: read a list of books (from a collection on your hard drive)
 * and use amazon review to rank them. This is helpful if you have lots of books.
 * It's good to put the best one on your kindle for the next vacation/conf etc'.
 *
 * @author Ido Green
 * @date 4/24/2011
 * @see https://greenido.wordpress.com/
 * http://amazon.com 
 * http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ - to handle regex IF you want to get ranking from the html
 * 
 */
class scanAmazon {

    private $books = array();
    private $newRankList = array();

    /**
     * Ctor
     * @param type $dir - the path to your directory of books
     */
    function __construct($dir) {
        $this->buildList($dir);
    }

    /**
     * Run on all the books and get the rating, then, save them to a CSV file.
     */
    public function run() {
        $this->getRating();
        $this->saveToFile("booksRanking.csv", implode("\n", $this->newRankList));
    }

    /**
     * build a list of books' name from the file names
     * @param type $dir - the path to your directory of books
     */
    private function buildList($dir) {
        if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
            while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
                //echo "$file\n";
                $name = substr($file, 0, strlen($file) - 5);
                if (strlen($name) > 2) {
                    array_push($this->books, $name);
                }
            }
            closedir($handle);
            sort($this->books);
        }
    }

    
    /**
     * Get the rating of the books
     * we are looking for this pattern: Rated 4.7 out of 5.0
     * 1. Use google results:  http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Aamazon.com+BOOK-NAME
     * 2. Use amazon directly: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=BOOK-NAME
     */
    private function getRating() {
        echo "Working on " . count($this->books) . " books\n";
        $i = 1;
        foreach ($this->books as $book) {  
            $searchUrl = 'http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=' . urlencode($book);
           // this is the pattern "alt="4.3 out of 5 stars"
            $resPage = file_get_contents($searchUrl);
            $matches = array();
            $ind2 = strpos($resPage, "out of 5 stars");
            $ind1 = $ind2 - 4;//strripos($resPage, '"',$ind2);
            
            //google: $ind1 = strpos($resPage, "Rated") + 5;
            //google: $ind2 = strpos($resPage, "out of", $ind1);
            if ($ind2 > $ind1 && ($ind2-$ind1) newRankList, $rank . "," . str_replace(",", " ", $book) . ",".
                        $searchUrl);
                echo "{$i}) {$book} - Ranking: {$rank} out of 5.0\n";
            }
            else {
                echo "{$i} ERR - {$book} got no rating url: {$searchUrl}\n";
            }
            $i++;
            sleep(5); // let not overload amazon server :)
            // $found = preg_match('/Rated (\d\.\d) out of 5.0/gi', $resPage, $matches);
            //if ($found && count($matches) > 0) { $rank = $matches[0]; }
        }
    }

    /**
     * simple saver of data/string to file
     * @param  $fileName
     * @param  $data
     * @return  false when we could not save the data
     */
    function saveToFile($fileName, $data) {
        try {
            $fh = fopen($fileName, 'w');
            fwrite($fh, $data);
            fclose($fh);
        } catch (Exception $exc) {
            error_log("Err: Could not write to file: {$fileName
                    } Trace:" . $exc->getTraceAsString());
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

}

// start the party
$scanner = new scanAmazon("PATH TO YOUR BOOKS");
$scanner->run();