Thinking in Java 3rd

This week's book reading include 6-8 chapters of Thinking in Java 3rd version in Chinese translation. These three sections highlight "Reusing Classes," "Polymorphism," and "Interfaces & Inner Classes," which form the key core of JAVA language.

Friday night, I talked with my friend who is working as the EIC of O'Reilly China.  We all agree that in current days fast-food IT books will soon, or already, be out of market because readers, like me, can easily get answer and learn basic skills of popular programming languages like JAVA, C++, or Python, from the WWW. Once readers have questions, they might directly go to Google and can get numerous answers and examples. Publishing such kinds of fast-food books can hardly have profits. All publishers should think about this problems, especially in China. In China, the four major IT publishers profits a lot from publishing such fast-food books, such as 24 hours to learn Windows XP. 

Today, when not profits can be owned from these books, what books can be the source of their revenue? 

Now, I think, publishers should look for authors like Buckle and publish such book as Thinking in Java. This is NOT a book for fresh fish, like six-month-ago me. However, contents in this book answer a lot of questions, which were posted everywhere in the WWW, but few people can answer them correctly. If readers want to be an advanced JAVA programmer, they should read the book from the first page to the end. And buy a hard copy and put on place where hands can easily touch. AND Re-Read it whenever they have time. 

Such kinds of books will be sold well and publishers will profit.

Connecting literature with objects

For finding who is indexing the scientific objects for literature, I conducted a random search. Here are some preliminary results.

        NASA ADS did the  closest work for indexing the astronomical objects from literature and explicitly associating literature with objects in its content page.

        PubMed integrate several databases, including genome and protein databases. Users can search genetic names in the literature search. However, no explicit link exist to connect literature with genomes or proteins.

        The MGI's Gene Expression Literature database, which is hosted by the Jackson Laboratory, has an interesting search function, which indexes literature in their database with genetic experssion. Hence each biblio-record has a link refering to genetic object.

So far, I didn't find clear statement about how they indexing this objects. But it seems that specific databases do start to index scientific objects to literature and build up the connection for research.