Are we talking about questions asking for book recommendations, or for a way to share/compile book recommendations? A question doesn't have to be the vehicle for the latter.

A question like "what are the best C++ books?" is likely to yield results that are haphazard and hard to manage. It would probably be more productive to focus on questions of the form "I want to learn more about X and have the following background and constraints; what is a good resource for self-study?". Notice what I did there: it's not a general-recommendation question, it's not meant to be the place for a whole topic, and it calls for context. (This is the approach that the "(something) Recommendations" sites on SE use.) This means we might end up with a bunch of questions about the same general topic, but approached from different angles. It seems like, with proper tagging, that could work, especially if these questions are in their own category.

But if the goal is to share knowledge, not ask a question (what I gather happened on SO, though I wasn't there), the community could instead use articles -- either general resources like Languages & Linguistics is doing, or a blog where a single author writes an article and there can be multiple articles on the same general topic. It sounds like you're not looking for the general-resources approach of L&L, but a blog approach could still work. You can set rules for blog posts, and community voting would provide signal.

posted about 2 years ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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