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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?

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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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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.

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> It would probably be more productive to focus on questions of the form "I want to learn more about ... (1 comment)
> It would probably be more productive to focus on questions of the form "I want to learn more about ...
Fred Wamsley‭ wrote almost 2 years ago

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?

Which is what I thought I had done, explaining that I had a C++ background but it was many years of language development in the past, and that I was looking for books to read to catch me up which were considered reputable.

I got a usable list from ChatGPT but ChatGPT never read any of those books for a software job.