Release Application : HackerBooks

[ekianjo]

You may have noticed I was kind of away both from Pandoralive and these boards for the past week, apart from the casual message here and there. I have been working on a small application that may prove useful to some of you who are interested in development. 

It's called HackerBooks and it's based on the concept of Hacker Shelf (the website) as well as numerous sources from StackOverflow where you can find where to download free books about programming in different languages. 

Why did I create this ? Well...

• I am a casual developer and because I lack time to fully dive and search for stuff on the net I always want to have complete resources on a subject as much as possible, i.e. books. 
• When programming, I like having my Pandora on the side as a second screen - to check the book/reference at the same time. 
• I like having all my programming books in the same place, and not mess them up with my other PDFs or ebooks. 
• There are many high quality books with CC licenses that I was not aware of, so I thought you may not be aware of them either. Everybody wins. 

It presents itself like that: A simple list with all the books available, with different categories indicated: 

Once you click on a book, you get the description of the contents... and you can Download it. 

One click on Download and a short wait... and you get the book:

You then click on "Read" button and it automatically launches the PDF reader (currently all books are in PDF but I plan to add support for HTML books down the road). Here's for example a book about Git: 

And even if you close the book, you can come back to it anytime and it will remember the last place where you stopped. 

It's already fully functional and I will package it for Pandora this weekend. It's written in python and it's open source, so if you are interested to fork it or work on it with me it will be up to you. 

I plan to add xournal support and more books as well in subsequent versions, but it's a good start for a release. 

More about it very soon !

 

[Askarus]

Sounds good.

 

[Asiyura]

That's a nice software.

I tend to keep a browser with a few tabs and pdf to find/read resources when programming.

And my screen is quite small - 13" 1280x800 - so I switch a lot between windows (it can be a bit troublesome).

I think that I will be able to get rid of that, having the books on pandora.

 

[ekianjo]

That's a nice software.

I tend to keep a browser with a few tabs and pdf to find/read resources when programming.

And my screen is quite small - 13" 1280x800 - so I switch a lot between windows (it can be a bit troublesome).

I think that I will be able to get rid of that, having the books on pandora.

Good, I hope it will be useful

 

[cube48]

Cool! I like the idea of such app a lot. 

One idea comes straight to my mind.

Do you think it would be possible to add a feature that would allow user to load custom/local PDFs? Just specifying path to folder with PDFs and it would search the filenames recursively through subfolders. Perhaps possibility to edit the categories (or other (meta) attributes) would make it even more perfect. I already have a lot of referrence PDFs and having them all in one central library app would be awesome.

Cheers!

 

[ekianjo]

Cool! I like the idea of such app a lot. 

One idea comes straight to my mind.

Do you think it would be possible to add a feature that would allow user to load custom/local PDFs? Just specifying path to folder with PDFs and it would search the filenames recursively through subfolders. Perhaps possibility to edit the categories (or other (meta) attributes) would make it even more perfect. I already have a lot of referrence PDFs and having them all in one central library app would be awesome.

Cheers!

That would probably be for a separate app BUt I like the idea! 

 

[ekianjo]

Now in the repo !

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=hackerbooks

Please try, rate and let me know your feedback ! Thank you.

 

[peelie]

hi great program, could you outline how it finds the books?

i am thinking wether this could be adapted to other subject matter books?

thx

 

[Neelix]

Looks good.    I do have a couple of requests though.

Could you make it possible to view (and sort by) whether or not there is already a local copy of a book?  This would be useful for offline use.

Any chance of adding the HOWTOs and Guides from TLDP?

- Neelix

 

[ekianjo]

Looks good.    I do have a couple of requests though.

Could you make it possible to view (and sort by) whether or not there is already a local copy of a book?  This would be useful for offline use.

Any chance of adding the HOWTOs and Guides from TLDP?

- Neelix

Ok, so i just implemented your first feature request. See new version in the repo

For the HOWTos you mentioned, it's possible, but there are a TON of them... I am rather interested into having full books inside the app than small tutorials that would crowd the interface. Unless there's a way to compile them into a larger one?

New version in the repo :

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=hackerbooks

Version info: 0.1.1 released June 30 : added menu bar with option to show only the already downloaded books for offline consultation + info about current version.

 

[Neelix]

Ok, so i just implemented your first feature request. See new version in the repo

Cheers!

For the HOWTos you mentioned, it's possible, but there are a TON of them... I am rather interested into having full books inside the app than small tutorials that would crowd the interface. Unless there's a way to compile them into a larger one?

Fair enough...

They are on a fairly diverse range of topics, so compiling them all into one (very) long document would kind of defeat the purpose.

How about just the Guides then? (which are by their own definition: "longer, in-depth books")

- Neelix

 

[ekianjo]

Ok, so i just implemented your first feature request. See new version in the repo

Cheers!

For the HOWTos you mentioned, it's possible, but there are a TON of them... I am rather interested into having full books inside the app than small tutorials that would crowd the interface. Unless there's a way to compile them into a larger one?

Fair enough...


They are on a fairly diverse range of topics, so compiling them all into one (very) long document would kind of defeat the purpose.


How about just the Guides then? (which are by their own definition: "longer, in-depth books")


- Neelix

I can agree with that. One question, are they all worth including? Some seem to be a little old. Just wondering if there's something to sort before including

 

[ekianjo]

I just added a bunch of other books in a new updated version. Neelix, your guides are not in there for now, however, probably in next update.

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=hackerbooks

Version info:
#0.1.2 released June 30 : added a bunch of other books to the list.

 

[Neelix]

How about just the Guides then? (which are by their own definition: "longer, in-depth books")

 I can agree with that. One question, are they all worth including? Some seem to be a little old. Just wondering if there's something to sort before including

Hrm... that's a good question. I'm sure most of them still offer a lot of valid information even if some of them are somewhat dated. When it comes right down to it the underlying set GNU tools and basic structure common to most linux based Operating Systems hasn't really changed that much though the years. If nothing else they offer a good groundwork for understanding the concepts that later work is based on.

That said however I do believe it's worth adding the year of publication to the descriptions of all the books available, so that users can keep that in mind when deciding relevance for their own use.

I noticed a UI glitch on the entry for "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist". The Download and Close buttons overlap. This may have something to do with the fact that the description for this book is longer than the text area at the default window size. Incidentally, is there any chance of adding a scroll bar in this situation?

- Neelix

 

[ekianjo]

I noticed a UI glitch on the entry for "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist". The Download and Close buttons overlap. This may have something to do with the fact that the description for this book is longer than the text area at the default window size. Incidentally, is there any chance of adding a scroll bar in this situation?


- Neelix

Yeah, I'm aware of that. I don't intend to add a scrollbar (while it would be possible) because to me it does not make sense to have a description that would span on several pages. I will simply remove some of description to make it fit (that's what i did for other books already).

About the year of publication, it's not that relevant actually. Some books about C are still very much up to date today because the way you program in C hasn't changed for the past 20 years. So it really depends on the subject. "New" does not always mean "better" for many things and it's also true for programming resources.

 

[Neelix]

I agree that old texts can still have relevance.   However, that doesn't mean it's not useful to know the date of publication of the book being offered.

- Neelix

 

[Binky]

^quote++

What if there were a book entitled "modern computer hardware"?

That would definitely need a date of publication/revision

 

[Neelix]

For less hypothetical example, one of the blurbs that already exists within HackerBooks refers to "last year"   which is pretty meaningless without a point of reference.

- Neelix

 

[ekianjo]

For less hypothetical example, one of the blurbs that already exists within HackerBooks refers to "last year"   which is pretty meaningless without a point of reference.

- Neelix

Ok, will include the dates at some point, but it's not super high on my priority list

 

[ekianjo]

I have seen some feedback on the repo comments that some people see the "Download" label on the button only partially (probably because of your system fonts choices). I have prepared a new version with bigger buttons. (and new books, too ). Will be in the repo soon enough.