Item — HN Reader

I wish I could be flattered that my book "Flask by Example" appears above the seminal "Two Scoops of Django" in the "Web Development" section[0], but instead I'm just left wondering how "Popularity Score" is calculated. We're only given:

"The scores are based on a combination of the popularity of the book and relevance to the topic. The best possible score is 100 and the worst is 0."

[0] http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/

1 comments

Two Scoops of Django is one of my favorite books! As to how popularity score is calculated: I used the Amazon Bestseller Rank of the book to assign a score for popularity. This rank loosely indicates how many copies of the book were bought recently. I found this to be well correlated with quality (I know many of these books by experience, and I found that the ones that I already knew to be good books rose to the top). In addition, when you filter for topics in the beginner section, another score is assigned based on relevance to those topics. This was a bit more work. I went through the contents of the book manually and tagged each book by the topics it covers and the percentage of the book devoted to that topic. After the relevance score is computed, it is combined with the popularity score to get a final score.

What about the free ones like Dive into python, LPTHW and others. People won't buy as much as the non free ones so the ratings may not be as accurate.

Good point. I bump the ranks of the free books slightly to adjust for that. Similarly, for books that have multiple editions, I make some adjustments to avoid penalizing these books for fragmentation.

Is Two Scoops on Amazon? I remember buying it (and some others - seems quite common for self published Dev books?) through leanpub or something like that.

Yup, it is on Amazon now, and so are many other self published books.