BestCommentaries.com Blog

Dr. John Walton, a Hebrew professor at Wheaton, sent me a list of recommended academic commentaries which I've added to Best Commentaries. But his list also included a grid view that listed books of the Bible on the left and commentaries series on top. Each cell had an icon representing how strongly he recommends the work. With Dr. Walton's permission, I used his idea to build something similar based on the overall rankings in Best Commentaries.

Here's what it looks like

Go check it out: Commentaries Series Rankings

Just wanted to let visitors to BestCommentaries know that I’ve recently started a blog on technology and theology called

www.donteatthefruit.com

Go check it out!

For all you Reformed folks out there (and anyone who wants to buy from an awesome Christian book store), I've added links to Westminster Bookstore. The "Best of Best Commentaries" page, now looks like this:

Notice the red Westminster icon (as well as the blue Logos icon) noting where the book is available.

Last week, Dan Pritchett from Logos emailed to suggest that I add links for books which are available in Logos' Libronix product. The guys at Logos sent over the links and now an icon appears next to any books which are available in Logos.

Here's a screen shot of the Genesis page:

And here's the popular "Best of Best Commentaries" page:

In the future, I'll continue to add links to stores and other means of accessing books when they become available.

In addition to the reviews users add, the site is now also pulling in reviews from Amazon.com. These are not used in the score as of yet, but they are displayed under the book's information.

It seems that usually only the reviewer's "nickname" is available (not the "Real Name"), but the name can also usually be linked to get an idea of what the person reviews.

A dear friend who is about to go on the mission field wanted to the 1 or 2 good commentaries for each book of the Bible before he left. He started using the site and going through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, etc. and looking at what the scores were to figure what he should buy.

About half way through the OT, I noticed that it was going to take a while to see what the best options were for all 66 books of the Bible. So I created a new page that lists the top 2 ranked commentaries for each book of the Bible.

www.bestcommentaries.com/best.aspx

I'm still working on the scoring algorithm and trying to see how Amazon ratings would effect it, but hopefully this page will allow visitors to get a quick start on the best commentaries available to date. Here's what it looks like:

Today I added a RSS feeds for 4 things:

• Recently published books - as the publication date passes, new books will show up
• Recently created libraries - when a user creates a new library on the site and then activates it
• Recently added book reviews - Right now this will include reviews from all users of the site, but I might change it to allow you to follow a specific user.
• Recently added books -this shows books that I'm adding to the site.

As more people join the site, I'm attempting to build in some tools to surface reviews which are more helpful than others. Obviously the length of a review will be a factor in how much information it gives. But another major factor is how knowledgeable a person is on a given subject. If a person joins the site and only offers a single review of a commentary, but no other reviews, then it is difficult to know what he or she really knows about that commentary in comparison to others.

This is something that makes Amazon reviews less useful than they could be, because we can't quickly tell how much a person really knows about the commentaries in relation to one another.

So, I've added to the bottom of each review the total number of reviews the person has submitted as well as the total number for a given book of the Bible. Here's a sample for Gordon Wenham's commentary on Genesis.

You can clearly see that Denver Seminary has a ton of reviews as well as quite a few in this category, as does the previous reviewer, but John Piper's Desiring God has fewer reviews in this category. Of course, we know that a theologian of John Piper's stature has likely looked at more than 3 commentaries on Genesis, but we might not know that about another site reviewer. Hopefully, this will help students get a better idea of the value of each review.