brian d foy asked: > I'm looking for a way to discover all the books ever published about > Perl. Where should I look?
Unless someone else has already created a bibliography of Perl books, you will find almost all books in library catalogs - except some edge cases that depend on what "published" means. Probably there are some printed Perl tutorials distributed by hand, that never made it into libraries, and the definition of e-Book is rather fuzzy. I bet you mean traditional printed books, right? So the tricky part is to find the right library catalogs and how to best query them. You wrote: > Is there a Perl interface for the WorldCat APIs? If not, I'll make > one. Are people merely shoving their results into something like > XML::Feed? I have a big dump of data The most-popular search APIs for library catalogs are Z39.50 which is now replaced by SRU http://search.cpan.org/dist/SRU/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-Z3950-ZOOM/ I guess you know http://www.oclc.org/developer/services/WCAPI > WorldCat has many of the books, but there are holes. I realize that > this is a union catalog instead of a historical database. Perl is very old, but not old enough to show up in historical databases ;-) WorldCat is the largest but not the only union catalog, especially if you search for non-English books. > I have the data dump from Google Books already. Where did you get this? > I figure that the Library of Congress knows about a lot of them, but > I don't have $20,000 to buy their 2012 database (or subsequent ones). Does someone at this list know whether all of LoC goes into WorldCat? In theory this query is a good use-case for Linked Data, but then you will have to wait some other 10 years. However libraries already use controlled vocabularies since centuries, so there are some subject headings for Perl. I only looked in the German national library: http://d-nb.info/gnd/4709495-3 Perl 6 http://d-nb.info/gnd/7638891-8 Perl 5.10 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4698927-4 Perl 5.8 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4698920-1 Perl 5.6.1 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4646656-3 Perl 5.6 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4419978-8 Perl 5 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4625418-3 mod_perl http://d-nb.info/gnd/4584437-9 Perl DBI http://d-nb.info/gnd/4307836-9 Perl in general The list of publications for each subject heading are available as RSS. Subject headings are important because the term "Perl" is used in other context too. For instance there is a German town of this name http://d-nb.info/gnd/4102974-4 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl,_Saarland Having said this, full text search is the best method to start with. A good place to find libraries is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources Many library catalogs are subsumed by union catalogs, so you don't need to query each of them. The best collection not created by libraries is LibraryThing, which is created by volunteers and provided good APIs too, see: http://www.librarything.com/tag/perl Perhaps the best method is crowd-sourcing the LibraryThing way. Sorry for not giving a simple answer. I doubt that you can find all Perl books in all languages fully automatically. Cheers Jakob -- brian d foy -- Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) Digitale Bibliothek - Jakob Voß Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1 37073 Goettingen - Germany +49 (0)551 39-10242 http://www.gbv.de jakob.v...@gbv.de
