Managing My Book Collection

I’m horny for books. I read them, I collect them, I admire them — especially those that are information security related.

Recently I’ve been running into a problem in the bookstore while browsing. I come across a title that looks intruiging and then realize that I’m not sure whether or not I already own it. It’s a horrible feeling, really. The old me says buy it anyway and give it away if it’s a duplicate, but the new me demands that I check first to see if I own it.

The obvious solution is to be able to check, from the bookstore, whether or not I actually already have a given book. So I made a list of my books in vi, sorted it for easy searching, and put it on the site.

Now, whenever I’m in doubt, I can conjure the page over my Blackberry and check to see if I have the damn thing before I buy it. :) W00t.

http://dmiessler.com/mybooks

Next I’ll complete my previous project of manually building a database to do this using LAMP. I did it already, but my table structure was primitive and the only functions I had were viewing all books and adding new books. What I’d ultimately like to be able to do is search by any field, e.g. author, edition, subject, etc.

Another thought I’ve been throwing around is the concept of tagging along the lines of Delicious. In other words, take each book and give it a series of tags. Then, just as with Delicious and Flikr, I could search for all books with a given tag (or even multiple tags). As an example, it’d be cool to call up all books of mine that have to do with database, or all my Python books, etc. Anyway, this’ll work for now.