Disclaimer: I am new here, I have not understood the overall policy of the site (yet), I can offer no moderator perspective, more a user and regular (unpaid) documentation contributor perspective.

The current answers mix a lot of different approaches together and the question was not specific in which approach should be pursued. Maybe instead of saying no, the goal should be to find a solution which is managable, not "authoritative" list with random books of questionable quality.

I would like to respond to the initial question how I understand it: Questions asking for book recommendations on a specific topic (e.g. getting started with python, clean code etc.) or even if a more complex topic can't really be answered or should be answered with book (or online resource) recommendations. It is not about "A question about a specific book" or comparing 2 books. Also, I am not sure about the collaborative community maintained authoritative answer. Why not use the ususal answer format and get the best answers upvoted?

I would be pro questions asking for recommendations and answers with (ideally) annotated book recommendations (where the recommendation is explained) because:

(1) A large flaw of Stack Overflow is IMHO offering too much fish and not enough teaching how to catch fish. If you ask for a book recommendation or how to get started as beginner or how to increase knowledge on specific topic or how to debug and troubleshoot, the question will (usually) be closed. But trivial RTFM or copy-paste beginner questions are heavily upvoted.

To be a "better" site with helping people learn and grow and figure things out for themselves (instead of only giving them the answers, ready to copy-paste), it is my wish the site offers more help for "how to learn something" and "figure things out themselves" and maybe not less but less prominent "how to do xyz".

(2) IMHO, some questions should not be asked, especially if they would be self-answered by taking a good book or online tutorial or online course and learning for an hour or even a week. But, as a beginner, it is very difficult to figure out what a good resource is. Help make it easier to rely on and strengthen good learning resources (be it in books, online, videos or whatever) instead of effectively replacing them. And offer something only where these fall short.

Example: Not programming related example for trivial beginner question and docs drowned out by forums in search:

• search for "exit vim". The documentation is drowned out by the forums in the search results. In the documentation, this question is answered. If the explanation in the docs is not sufficient, I would attempt to improve the documentation, not ask and heavily upvote a question about it on Stack Overflow. The same goes for many Git questions, JavaScript etc.
• Another example: The Apache web server documentation online is free and excellent. Yet many people insist on asking trivial questions where the answers are literally copy-pasted from the docs.

Book recommendations will not entirely solve this. But they are a start and a commitment to fostering learning.

posted about 2 years ago

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sypets‭

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