User:Average/Library

Name some good books for a hackerspace library. NOTE: Move this over to HackerBookShelf

Categories (generally three under each topic: history, theory, application):

• Computers Theory and History
  • "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", Steven Levy
  • Back-issues of Wired(?), MAKE, and Mondo2000 magazines.
• Computer Programming
  • "C++ Programming Reference", Bjarne Stroustrup
  • "A Book on C", Kelly and Pohl
  • "The C Programming Language", Kernighan and Ritchie.
  • "The Art of Unix Programming", Eric Raymond
• System Administration and Linux
  • "The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", Eric Raymond
  • "DNS and Bind", O'Reilly
  • "TCP/IP", O'Reilly
• Building and Crafting
  • "The Whole Earth Catalog", Stewart Brand, 1968, 1994.
  • "Cool Tools", Kevin Kelly
  • "The Art of Tinkering", Karen Wilkinson, Make Petrich
  • "Dummies Guide to Welding", xxx
• Electronics,
  • "Art of Electronics", Paul Horowitz, Winfred Hill
  • Arduino books,
• Math
  • "The Colossal Book of Mathematics", Martin Gardner (and pretty much anything by him)
• Information Theory
  • Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine", Robert Lucky
  • Data visualization
    • "Visual Display of Quantitative Information", Edward Tufte
    • "Envisioning Information", Tufte
• Science Fiction and Fantasy.
  • "Ender's Game" Orson Scott Card
  • "Earth", David Brin
  • "I, Robot", Isaac Asimov
  • "Lord of the Rings", J.R.R.Tolkein
  • Some H.P. Lovecraft.
• Zeitgeist books:
  • "Generation X:Tales for an Accelerated Culture", Douglas Copeland, 1991
  • "The Rise of the Creative Class", Richard Florida, 2002
  • "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality", Richard Heinberg, 2011
  • "The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto", Kevin Carson, in draft.

For subject organization, start with this 4-part, meta + fractal form: TAG + HISTORY, then (THEORY), [APPLICATIONS]. For the outermost branch, the TAG can just be called the "Tree of Knowledge", and the HISTORY the journey of, say, 5000 years. Tree of Knowledge(Philosophy [Ethics (Law, ...), Political Science (Constitutional Science, Leadership, ...)] Logic [Math (Arithmetic, Information Theory, Geometry)], FOPC])

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Design pattern for managing personal libraries:

• Create a form, providing a field for writing the book Title, Author, these instructions for how to use the "self-organizing library", and plenty of blank lines for people to put their name and date when they borrow a book.
• Print these out, two to a page, and cut. You want the sheet to stick out.
• Fill in the Title/Author info and stick it in the book.
• When a user wants to borrow a book, s/he prints his/her name on the next blank line, removes the sheet and places it in place of the book, laying it horizontally, so that others can see that a book has been checked out.
• When the user returns the book, their name is crossed out, and one slips the paper back in the book.
• If you don't want to do this with all the books, place the slips into your most prized books, and advise others to fill out a form-slip when they take out a book without one.

Idea for "self-organizing library" from Steve Smith of sf_x.