We get a lot of book recommendation questions, so much so that it's hard to keep up with them.
We've been closing them as off-topic, not a real question, and not constructive based on a few different points of guidance:
- The What questions should I not ask here? part of our FAQ
- Q&A is Hard, Let's Go Shopping!
- Are “I'm looking for X” questions on topic?
- Other consensus built elsewhere on the network like Gaming.SE: What should be done with questions asking for game recommendations?
However, due to the sheer number of these questions we get, I wonder if we should revisit this and see where we as a community stands on book recommendations.
Are book recommendations on-topic? If so, why? What preconditions need to be met for a good book recommendation question?
If not, do we need to add a new line under What about other programming-related questions? to make it explicitly clear they're not allowed? Something like:
- Book recommendations (e.g. What's the best book to learn Python?)