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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Should asking about book recommendations directly connected to software development be on-topic?

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Should asking about book recommendations directly connected to software development be on-topic?

+7
−0

Context

We have recently received a suggestion to allow questions about recommending books directly connected to software development.

The way I see this now (pros and cons)

Pros:

  • allow more questions that help software developers

Cons:

  • tend to be open-ended, unless there is not a vast domain (e.g. Java development)
  • tend to be opinion based

What do you think? Should we allow such questions?

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+9
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I respect Alexei for opening a discussion on this, and Lundin for providing hard-won real world experience. I would like to put in a "pro", on the grounds that "I read this book and I'm a better programmer for it" is information that directly supports the codidact mission of helping each other learn. It's related to the old observation that bad IT people have walls full of certifications and good ones have shelves full of books. A fair question is how to maintain adequate quality and I'm short of concrete suggestions at the moment. Lundin's attempt to limit recommendations to things the person posting has actually read seems like a reasonable minimum.

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Beyond "I have read it and it was good" (1 comment)
Beyond "I have read it and it was good"
Lundin‭ wrote about 2 years ago

A quality list goes beyond "I have read it and it was good" though, because everyone can read a book and share an opinion of it. You can then get a recommendation about how easy to read and pedagogic the books was (similar to Amazon reviews perhaps). But not a measurement of technical correctness. Some aspects are more important when addressing beginners (you get away with simplifications) compared to when addressing veterans (everything said must be correct). What we wished SO to have was a list of book recommendations that had actually been read by domain experts who could also judge the technical correctness. Between myself and the domain expert who volunteered to maintain the list, we had maybe read ten or so of the books, less than half of what was listed at a whim. Better then if only books actually read by experts were listed and (anti) recommended after that.