Post History

As someone who spent _a lot_ of time trying to get this to work on Stack Overflow, I would advise against it. 

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**Some background story of my merry adventures with book lists**:

The story starts around here: [Delete the list of random books?](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295460/delete-the-list-of-random-books) Back in 2015 I stumbled upon a list of random books not necessarily even about programming. It was such a clearly bad and off-topic post that I thought it would be no big deal to delete it. I quickly got quite significant community consensus of around +75 score to back me up. Several moderators had correctly tried to get rid of it over the years too, only to get some deletion rollback. SO staff overruled moderators at several occasions. In the end, I could only conclude that the list of random books was important because it had lots of traffic, even though it was fairly blatantly off-topic.

A couple of years later, a moderator decided to merge all post in a similar book list regarding C programming specifically. This list was far more on-topic and I had initially supported it and contributed to it. But after the list was merged, it was no longer clear who was recommending what, which recommendations that had been up-voted and so forth. It was no longer a list of _recommended_ books, but just a list of books. It was also highly subjective and poorly maintained.

Taking it to meta again, I posted [The C book list has gone haywire. What to do with it?](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/355588/the-c-book-list-has-gone-haywire-what-to-do-with-it) Again community consensus was reached, the post was deleted and that ought to have been the end of it.

Then some year later, staff (again) does a rollback undeletion, unaware of the previous consensus to delete it. Just because a high rep user has urged them to undelete it. Again, I had to explain that it was still a mess, a list of random books neither sensible nor actively maintained by the community. The user who had insisted to undelete it said that they would organize active maintenance of the post and they have since then done a little bit of that, although not nearly enough.

Another year later, not much had happened. I posted [this](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/379637/584518), arguing that if we were to keep the book list, we had to severely step up the quality concerns. I made some suggestions for a quality criteria, including a proposal to add shockingly pedantic requirements such as "you shouldn't recommend a book unless you have actually read". This post didn't get much attention and so the whole thing remained in "status quo", where it remains to this day.

Many years later and these two horrible book lists are still there. Evening though they are explicitly off-topic for SO and of very poor quality, recommending things at a whim, including bad books. Making the Internet a worse place, one recommendation at a time.

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**Lessons learnt**

_Since book recommendations are subjective by their nature, people's opinions about how to maintain the book list are also similarly subjective._

Including: 
- What scope should the book list have?
- How should the book list should be maintained and by whom?
- What criteria there should be for adding a book?
- What criteria there should be for removing a book, if any at all? 
- Should anti-recommendations be allowed or not?

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**Codidact perspective**

Ok so Codidact isn't SO and at least we don't have to worry about some company goons undeleting things that were bad but rendered precious site traffic. 

We do also have a little bit experience from other Codidact sites allowing recommendations: [Outdoors - Gear Recommendations](https://outdoors.codidact.com/categories/28) and [Photography & Video - Gear Recommendations](https://photography.codidact.com/categories/24). Ignoring imported SE posts, these have mostly been well-received, or at least not heavily down-voted. 

Overall, I think the spirit of Codidact is to have a higher tolerance about posts that address important topics even though those topics may be on the opinion-based side of things. So maybe recommendation-like questions work better here than on the big SE sites. There do exist smaller SE sites dealing exclusively with recommendations and those seem to be doing ok too.

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**A need for trusted recommendations still exists**

With crappy Internet/Youtube tutorials becoming increasingly common, it can't be denied that a canon of _actually good_ learning material is more important than ever. And as shown by the previously mentioned book recommendation lists, there's no shortage of really bad books either.

Just yesterday, I went up against some C programming book on SO, verifying that yes indeed, you are right to question this book, because it is wrong. It's valuable to mankind to have a place where confused students can verify that their books or teachers are not a source of learning, but a source of confusion.

However, and this is probably the biggest argument against it, I don't think Codidact has enough domain experts to maintain quality of any such book recommendation lists. On SO you might have some 10-20 leading experts in any given topic, proof-reading what you write. Meaning that the site can actually do things like confidently questioning the correctness of authoritative sources like programming books or compilers. 

Although even with expertise in place, SO has repeatedly failed to provide useful book recommendation lists... There are some which supposedly are ok(?) like their C++ list, but I haven't read enough C++ books to tell.

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**My conclusion**

There _may_ be a place for programming book recommendations here, but unless we can definitely guarantee quality, we shouldn't attempt it.