Book 'Em, Dano (er, Joel)

Today, Joel had a dilemma. Seems like he has so many books, he can't figure out what to do with it. He wants to classify the books in some reasonable order, and thus, either he goes with Dewey decimal, or he goes with the Library of Congress classification.

Now, maybe Joel has a wide variety of books ranging from cookbooks to philosophy to history to literature. If so, his endeavor is reasonable.

But, if the Fog Creek library collection is what I think it is, the books will fall into several categories: programming language books, books on APIs, software engineering books, books by Joel himself, and books on management. If so, many of his books will fall in an extremely narrow category and the classification system won't do him that much good.

I would suggest that he come up with some broad categories first that make sense to him. For example, programming, programming languages, Joel books, management books. Within each category, he's likely to know which books he refers to all the time. Let's assume the "I use these books all the time" is a small subset of all the other books. Have a special bookshelf for these frequently used books. This is his L1 cache of F.U.B's.

Heck, while we're at it, let's have an L2 cache. Books that are used once in a while, but not anywhere near as often the frequently used list. The rest are rarely used texts.

Now, he's still going to want a barscanner, if for no other reason, that everytime you grab a book, you should scan the book, and claim you took it. As some point, you can return it. However, the actual sorting may not be so critical.

Point is, you have lots of books. But, more than likely, you care only about 20 of them (for those on the Joel Management Track, put those books in its own special bookcase) all the time, and you should have a special bookcase for that, so you can find it easily.

Of course, we could wait for Google to scan them all in, and you just find them online.

I have one more wacky idea. Ever been to a busy restaurant? Some of them give you this beeping thing that flashes light when a table becomes available or when the order is ready? If there were only such a thing for books, you could attach it to its side, and it would make noise and light up so you could find it.