I’ve recently been reading Langville and Meyer’s book, Who’s #1?: The Science of Rating and Ranking. This is a neat book filled with nice ideas, which are clearly explained. This isn’t Langville and Meyer’s first foray into helping popularise ranking, having previously written: Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings. While that book concentrated more specifically on the ideas behind Google’s PageRank algorithm, the current offering covers a slightly wider range of material. However, as with the first book, the material is interesting, and well explained. I think that it would be useful for anyone wanting to teach a course on ranking, and covers some excellent areas that could be used for special topics lectures or guest lectures. The material is well presented and would make good reading for undergraduates and some advanced high school students. Having had fun with football ranking problems a few years ago, I found this book to be nice summary of the area. Great read!