Similarly, the only way to sort music is firstly by the first note played, and secondly by the quantity of drugs the composer was on at the time.

Update:

On reflection, I this comment was sub-consciously influenced by Borge's Animals. I think we could all benefit from a brief contemplation of this classification paradigm.

The only reliable way to organise books on shelves is to not organise them at all. If you sort by ISBN, then you're stuffed if you need to insert in the middle as you have to shuffle everything along, perhaps onto other shelves, which in turn means you have to move stuff on those shelves, and so on. The best way to organise books on shelves is to just put them wherever there's space, and use a searchable database to keep track of what's where.

Anyway, sorting by ISBN is approximately the same as sorting by publisher. Which is what Foyles in London used to do. People hated it, and they only stayed in business because there were no other large bookshops nearby. Now that several others have opened, Foyles have adopted a much more sensible sorting algorithm - they mostly sort by subject, author and title. Although they do still have a seperate section for O'Reilly books.

Each store/chain is free to do what they like, but most books now come from the publisher with a "default" section designation, typically printed on the upper left corner of the back cover.

It isn't a cure-all, however, as some books have multiple suggestions — for example, Effective Java⇒ has:
Java/Internet Programming/Programming Languages.

I love it that in U.K public libraries they used to (and still do, in fact) organise their shelves by the Dewey Decimal system , which put subjects in this order:

# 000 – Computer science, information, and general works
# 100 – Philosophy and psychology
# 200 – Religion
# 300 – Social sciences
# 400 – Languages
# 500 – Science and Mathematics
# 600 – Technology and applied science
# 700 – Arts and recreation
# 800 – Literature
# 900 – History and geography and biography,
[download]

and the 100's always seemed to attract the rather far out and wacky end of the spectrum.

I always thought it entertaining that books on programming ended up sharing a shelf with Erich_von_Daniken ;-)

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