Let’s Earn Money Online
#1 Getting Started
Let me start by admitting one thing – I really don’t know how to earn money online. I did browse Irfan Khairi’s and Tze-something books in bookstores few times before but their ideas and messages never registered in my head.
I know I have to start doing it. Like board games and programming, I can only learn by actually playing and cracking head over it, rather than by reading.
I’ll document everything that I do in this blog, and if you have advices, do pour them on me. My main interest however is in learning and gaining greater understanding of Internet and web technologies. Then only will I start thinking about huge money-making.
I believe I’ll be quite slow in my learning due to my other commitments and interests. I might fail in earning any money, but I dont think I will fail in being more proficient with web technologies.
Ok .. enough talking. Let’s for once get really started. I’ll open my Notepad, and write down (type) the ISBN of all books that I have. One line each. Some books have both ISBN 10 and ISBN 13, latter is assigned to books published after 1 January 2007. Choose to record ISBN 13 whenever possible, ISBN 10 is subset of ISBN 13 afterall. There is no need for recording title, publisher etc as these information can be extracted from online database somewhere, hopefully.
Wish me luck. 
p/s: Ah, my idea revolves around Amazon affiliate programme, book reviews, ebooks, AdSense etc. I dont know yet.
#2 Building Book Database
Ok, so now I have listed the ISBN of most of my books in a Notepad TXT file. General idea was to extract information i.e. Title, Publisher etc from the Internet with just the ISBN number as reference. I have actually found a free online database to be the source, it’s ISBNDB.
First of all, let me show you the list of my ISBNs. I originally included dashes ( i.e. 4-87187-015-4 ) but found out it was not necessary, so I used Replace All feature to remove them.
I dont have that many books actually, about 100 only. 
To use the ISBNDB API (application programming interface), you will need to have Access Key, which will only be given to registered user. Registration is very easy as minimal information and no confirmation is required. Please visit the website and click on Account tab to start creating one.
Ok, now we have come to a slightly more difficult but interesting part. Programming Basically the idea is to read each ISBN from the Notepad, send request to ISBNDB and save the response. I choose to use Perl programming language for this. If you don’t have the Perl interpreter install, get one from ActiveState.
Create a new Perl file (extension .pl) in the same directory as the list of ISBNs. Now I have directory ‘c:\idazuwaika’ with ‘isbn.pl’ and ‘MyISBN.txt’ in it. Write the following codes in ‘isbn.pl’. However, replace the redded part with your own Access Key from ISBNDB, obtained upon registration.
What the code does is preparing output file ‘DataISBN.xml’ (an XML file) to save responses from ISBNDB, and preparing file ‘MyISBN.txt’ to be read. ‘MyISBN.txt’ is then read, for each ISBN, a query is sent to ISBNDB and the response is written to ‘DataISBN.xml’.
This Perl code can be run from Command Prompt. Navigate to the directory and execute ‘perl isbn.pl’. Screen capture below:
After the program finish executing, we will have saved responses from ISBNDB to our queries in file ‘DataISBN.xml’. Each response is actually meant to be in separate XML files, but I prefer to collect them altogether into one. To conform to XML standard, we need to remove redundant statements
from the file. Again, Replace All feature can be used. However one and only one of above statement must remain, and must be put at the top of the file. Also add <DataISBN> after that and </DataISBN> at the end.
Well, for now, the process of collecting data is complete. Presenting the data in nice HTML format comes later. View the result below:
ISBNDB gives the following information for each ISBN query:
- ISBN
- ISBN 13
- Title
- TitleLong
- AuthorText
- PublisherText
Please note that not all queries will be answered with above information. See the last entry in above image for example, the database can’t find the result. Probably because this database is incomplete. I do have a lot of Go books in Korean, Japanese and Chinese afterall, and it’s quite likely that these are not registered by ISBNDB.
#3 Presenting Data in HTML
Yea, yea, I dont have job today.
From previous, I have already had information of my books stored in structured XML file called “DataISBN.xml” in directory “c:/idazuwaika”. To present this data in HTML, I chose to use the free Saxon XSLT processor. Download here.
Next, I created an XSL file ’style.xsl’ in directory ‘c:\idazuwaika’, and wrote the following:
What this does is giving instruction to Saxon XSLT processor on how to style the raw XML data into a HTML output.
Next, launch Command Prompt, navigate to \bin (of the downloaded Saxon XSLT processor) and execute the following:
Options for Saxon
-s: [XML source]
-xsl: [the XSL stylesheet]
-o: [the output i.e. HTML]
Well, the HTML output is ready. I copy paste here.
Update
I figured out that OpenLibrary.org could give cover images. Hooray !!
Add the following code to ’style.xsl’ add the image links to the output HTML.
My Book Collection
 |
|
| No. | 1 |
| Title | Life & Death (Beginner and Elementary Go Books) |
| Author | James Davies |
| ISBN | 4906574130 |
| ISBN 13 | 9784906574131 |
| Publisher | Kiseido Publishing Co |
 |
|
| No. | 2 |
| Title | Tesuji |
| Author | James Davies |
| ISBN | 4906574122 |
| ISBN 13 | 9784906574124 |
| Publisher | Kiseido Publishing Co |
 |
|
| No. | 3 |
| Title | The Endgame |
| Author | Tomoko Ogawa, |
| ISBN | 4871870154 |
| ISBN 13 | 9784871870153 |
| Publisher | Ishi Pr |
 |
|
| No. | 4 |
| Title | 802. 11 wireless networks |
| Author | Matthew S. Gast |
| ISBN | 0596100523 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780596100520 |
| Publisher | Beijing ; O’Reilly, 2005. |
 |
|
| No. | 5 |
| Title | Java examples in a nutshell |
| Author | David Flanagan |
| ISBN | 0596006209 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780596006204 |
| Publisher | Sebastopol, CA : O’Reilly, c2004. |
 |
|
| No. | 6 |
| Title | 3G wireless networks |
| Author | Clint Smith, Daniel Collins |
| ISBN | 007226344X |
| ISBN 13 | 9780072263442 |
| Publisher | New York : McGraw-Hill, c2007. |
 |
|
| No. | 7 |
| Title | Visual Basic 6 complete |
| Author | |
| ISBN | 0782124690 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780782124699 |
| Publisher | San Francisco : Sybex, c1999. |
 |
|
| No. | 8 |
| Title | Gateway To Chinese Culture |
| Author | Fu Chunjiang, |
| ISBN | 9812293280 |
| ISBN 13 | 9789812293282 |
| Publisher | Asiapac |
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|
| No. | 9 |
| Title | Making Friends |
| Author | Andrew Matthews, |
| ISBN | 981001953X |
| ISBN 13 | 9789810019532 |
| Publisher | Media Masters |
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|
| No. | 10 |
| Title | Starting an online business for dummies(r), 5th Edition |
| Author | Greg Holden |
| ISBN | 0470107391 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780470107393 |
| Publisher | Indianapolis, IN : Wiley Pub., 2007. |
 |
|
| No. | 11 |
| Title | How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera, Fourth Edition |
| Author | Dave Johnson, |
| ISBN | 0072261633 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780072261639 |
| Publisher | McGraw-Hill Osborne Media |
 |
|
| No. | 12 |
| Title | Jamsa’s C/C++/C# programmer’s bible |
| Author | Kris Jamsa |
| ISBN | 0766846822 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780766846821 |
| Publisher | [Las Vegas, NV] : Onword Press, c2002. |
 |
|
| No. | 13 |
| Title | Computer graphics using OpenGL |
| Author | F. S. Hill, Jr |
| ISBN | 0133203263 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780133203264 |
| Publisher | Upper Saddle River, London : Prentice Hall, c2001. |
 |
|
| No. | 14 |
| Title | Korean for dummies |
| Author | |
| ISBN | 0470037180 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780470037188 |
| Publisher | Hungry Minds, 2007. |
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|
| No. | 15 |
| Title | Processing XML with Java |
| Author | Elliotte Rusty Harold |
| ISBN | 0201771861 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780201771862 |
| Publisher | Boston : Addison-Wesley, c2003. |
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|
| No. | 16 |
| Title | Emotional intelligence |
| Author | Daniel Goleman |
| ISBN | 0747528306 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780747528302 |
| Publisher | London : Bloomsbury, 1996. |
 |
|
| No. | 17 |
| Title | Speak Chinese today: A Basic Course in the Modern Language |
| Author | Beverly Hong, Zhu Bingyao, |
| ISBN | 0804817154 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780804817158 |
| Publisher | Tuttle Publishing |
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|
| No. | 18 |
| Title | God Created the Integers |
| Author | Stephen W. Hawking (Editor) |
| ISBN | 0762430044 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780762430048 |
| Publisher | Running Press Book Publishers |
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|
| No. | 19 |
| Title | Life & Games of Mikhail Tal |
| Author | Mikhail Tal |
| ISBN | 1857442024 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781857442021 |
| Publisher | Everyman Publishers |
 |
|
| No. | 20 |
| Title | All about stocks |
| Author | Esmé Faerber |
| ISBN | 0071345086 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780071345088 |
| Publisher | New York : McGraw-Hill, c2000. |
 |
|
| No. | 21 |
| Title | CCNA self-study exam certification guide |
| Author | Wendell Odom |
| ISBN | 1587200945 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781587200946 |
| Publisher | Indianapolis, Ind. : Cisco, [2006]. |
 |
|
| No. | 22 |
| Title | CCNA self-study exam certification guide |
| Author | Wendell Odom |
| ISBN | 158720083X |
| ISBN 13 | 9781587200830 |
| Publisher | Indianapolis, Ind. : Cisco, [2006]. |
 |
|
| No. | 23 |
| Title | Berlitz Mandarin Chinese Compact Dictionary: Chinese – English / English – Chinese |
| Author | Berlitz Publishing (Editor) |
| ISBN | 9812469478 |
| ISBN 13 | 9789812469472 |
| Publisher | Berlitz Guides |
 |
|
| No. | 24 |
| Title | Art of War |
| Author | Sun Tzu, |
| ISBN | 1864761687 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781864761689 |
| Publisher | Grange Books |
 |
|
| No. | 25 |
| Title | Elementary Chinese Readers |
| Author | Beijing Language Institute, |
| ISBN | 7800521354 |
| ISBN 13 | 9787800521355 |
| Publisher | Sinolingua |
 |
|
| No. | 26 |
| Title | Office 2003 XML for Power Users |
| Author | Matthew MacDonald |
| ISBN | 1590592646 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781590592649 |
| Publisher | APress |
 |
|
| No. | 27 |
| Title | FUZZY LOGIC |
| Author | Daniel Mcneill, |
| ISBN | 0671875353 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780671875350 |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
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|
| No. | 28 |
| Title | The code book |
| Author | Simon Singh |
| ISBN | 0385495323 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780385495325 |
| Publisher | New York : Anchor Books, 2000, c1999. |
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|
| No. | 29 |
| Title | Perl, CGI, and JavaScript complete |
| Author | |
| ISBN | 0782127800 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780782127805 |
| Publisher | Alameda, CA : Sybex Inc., 2000. |
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|
| No. | 30 |
| Title | XML complete |
| Author | [editors, Pat Coleman... et al.] |
| ISBN | 0782140335 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780782140330 |
| Publisher | San Francisco, CA : Sybex, 2001. |
 |
|
| No. | 31 |
| Title | Dictionary of Basic Tesuji: Volume 1 |
| Author | Fujisawa Shuko 9 Dan, |
| ISBN | 1932001190 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781932001198 |
| Publisher | Slate & Shell |
 |
|
| No. | 32 |
| Title | Dictionary of Basic Tesuji Voume II |
| Author | Fujisawa Shuko 9 Dan, |
| ISBN | 1932001239 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781932001235 |
| Publisher | Slate & Shell |
 |
|
| No. | 33 |
| Title | Dictionary of Basic Tesuji, Volume 3 |
| Author | Fujisawa Shuko 9 Dan, |
| ISBN | 1932001255 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781932001259 |
| Publisher | Slate & Shell |
 |
|
| No. | 34 |
| Title | The 3-3 Point, Modern Opening Strategy |
| Author | Cho Chikun, Nine-Dan Cho Chikun, Stuart Dowsey (Translator) |
| ISBN | 4871870448 |
| ISBN 13 | 9784871870443 |
| Publisher | Ishi Press International |
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|
| No. | 35 |
| Title | Internet and World Wide Web How to Program |
| Author | Paul Deitel, Andrew Goldberg, |
| ISBN | 0131246828 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780131246829 |
| Publisher | Prentice Hall |
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|
| No. | 36 |
| Title | Lee Changho’s Novel Plays & Shapes v.1 |
| Author | Craig Hutchinson, Sidney W.K. Yuan, Lee Changho (Editor), Lee Changho (Translator) |
| ISBN | 1889554529 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781889554525 |
| Publisher | Yutopian Enterprises |
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|
| No. | 37 |
| Title | Java programming for dummies |
| Author | by Donald J. Koosis and David Koosis |
| ISBN | 076450388X |
| ISBN 13 | 9780764503887 |
| Publisher | Foster City, CA : IDG Books Worldwide, c1998. |
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|
| No. | 38 |
| Title | French for dummies |
| Author | by Dodi-Katrin Schmidt, Michelle M. Williams, Dominique Wenzel; Berlitz series editor, Juergen Lorenz |
| ISBN | 0764551930 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780764551932 |
| Publisher | Foster City, CA : IDG Books Worldwide, c2000. |
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|
| No. | 39 |
| Title | Astronomy for dummies |
| Author | by Stephen P. Maran |
| ISBN | 0764551558 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780764551550 |
| Publisher | Foster City, CA : IDG Books Worldwide, c1999. |
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|
| No. | 40 |
| Title | JavaScript annotated archives |
| Author | Jeff Frentzen and Henry Sobotka with additional material from Dewayne McNair |
| ISBN | 0078823641 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780078823640 |
| Publisher | Berkeley, Calif. : Osborne/McGraw Hill, c1998. |
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|
| No. | 41 |
| Title | Sams teach yourself Java 2 in 21 days |
| Author | Laura Lemay, Rogers Cadenhead |
| ISBN | 0672316382 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780672316388 |
| Publisher | Indianapolis, Ind. : Sams Publishing, c1999. |
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|
| No. | 42 |
| Title | Excel 2007 Power Programming With VBA |
| Author | John Walkenbach, |
| ISBN | 0470044012 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780470044018 |
| Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
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|
| No. | 43 |
| Title | AI Application Programming |
| Author | M. Tim Jones |
| ISBN | 1584502789 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781584502784 |
| Publisher | Charles River Media |
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|
| No. | 44 |
| Title | The Forensic Casebook : The Science of Crime Scene Investigation |
| Author | NGAIRE E. GENGE |
| ISBN | 0345452038 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780345452030 |
| Publisher | Ballantine Books |
 |
|
| No. | 45 |
| Title | Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Publisher 98 in 24 Hours |
| Author | Ned Snell, |
| ISBN | 0672313049 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780672313042 |
| Publisher | Sams |
 |
|
| No. | 46 |
| Title | Perl |
| Author | [authors, Paul Whitehead, Eric Kramer] |
| ISBN | 0764534785 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780764534782 |
| Publisher | Foster City, Calif. : IDG, 2000. |
 |
|
| No. | 47 |
| Title | Professional Linux Kernel Architecture |
| Author | Wolfgang Mauerer, |
| ISBN | 0470343435 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780470343432 |
| Publisher | Wrox |
very impressive – scary books though…hahah
heh.. kiddy programming only
just found another database that could give cover image as well, would be nicer.
haha.. OpenLibrary.org is so cool.. they have a lot of cover images !!
awesome waq!
you do have a lot of books….
better buy books since you get a tax break!
haha… dont ask me how many i have read though.
wow… hebat giler…