[timezone]

I have a question about folder organization. This can apply to any subject area. In my case it relates to programming and novels. At the moment I have programming books organized by publisher because each one has their own style. For example people that know Apress, Sitepoint and the Headfirst series of books know they have very different styles of writing. Of course at a certain point it might make more sense to organize by web development and programming for example rather than by publisher. Then there are the novels. Once I have a few books by a particular author I prefer organizing by author. However for non-fiction books it may make sense to organize by subject matter, similar to how I might end up organizing my programming books.

At this juncture I may have two or three dozen books. Before I buy too many more books I was wondering how other people organize their books . I know there are people out there with hundreds of books. How do you organize your folders and do you create a large number of shortcuts to jump into the different directory levels? Do you follow any soft rules that say you won't create x number of folders down from the root directory? Are there any unique ways of keeping things organized and relatively flat so that one doesn't have to traverse too many levels of directories?

Thanks in advance.