Naked links offer varying level of affordance on different platforms. I've frequently been on systems (or networks) in which following through on individual links is a pain. What's particularly annoying in this case is that Amazon's full links do include item descriptions (for books: the title) in them, though you'd have to click through to the links here, search the fucking title and then click on that link before you get what you're looking for:
e12e's comment was helpful: it supported the original post and included additional information of use to others. And as it happens, Singh's The Code Book was not included in the original list. You can find it here:
munin would have performed a superior service (remember: writing is for the benefit of the reader) if he'd at least included descriptive URLs, if not the titles of the works in question.
And your attitude could use considerable improvement.
I thought it was clear that I think it belongs on a list of books that give a better treatment of codes, codebreaking and intelligence history than "Cryptonomicon" (as parent's list claim to be).
As for being lazy, I'm not about to click through ten [edit six] links on my cell phone just to see what title hides behind the links; I appreciate that parent made a list of (presumably) relevant books -- I would have appreciated it more if he or she listed the actual book titles/authors as well.
As it was; I felt it made sense to recommend Singh's book as it is very good and relevant -- and that it wouldn't contribute much to the discussion to overtly critize parent for being inconveniently (for me) lazy.
But since you bring it up; personally I think it is good netiquette to prefix links with a meaningful title when not contained in the url, when posting in a mostly-plain-text medium. The title and author (optionally year) is relevant information -- an amazon link is trivially discoverable from that (as is a hit in your local library db) -- but the amazon link by itself isn't useful without leaving the context of the discussion. And opening ten tabs on a desktop browser on a reasonable fast connection is certainly not an insourmountable effort -- but is rather inconvenient on a cell phone (For all I know that might be why parent choose to list just the links -- mobile cut'n'paste between tabs is a pretty miserable).
