How should we handle questions that take the form of "Can you recommend books about topic X?" Are they considered to be poll/list questions and therefore inappropriate here?
Example: https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/801/30
Are these considered polls or lists. Do the fall into the bad subjective category? Is there a way to ask them that would be considered on-topic and valuable?
Where to we draw the line? See also: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/q/192/30
Actually these are a combination of two types of questions that are generally discouraged.
These are shopping questions and list questions. Shopping questions are questions that ask for a specific product recommendation. Generally these are discouraged because they become outdated rather quickly (this is less true on a site like this where the technology/knowledge base does not change quickly. However it is a reason to take great care in what questions you ask and to give good reasons why it won't be outdated in 10 minutes.
List questions are generally discouraged because typically each answer is equally valid and no one can post an exhaustive answer.
It would behoove us to continue to discourage these questions unless they are incredibly narrow or obscure.
It's tempting to see book recommendation questions open elsewhere on the site and say we should allow them here, but that way lies madness.
Questions don't automatically get closed: people who can close have to be made aware of them. Every site has questions that slip through the cracks, and just because you can find examples of questions that haven't been closed doesn't mean they're on-topic.
And that is just generally a good thing to keep in mind when it comes to other questions about whether something is off-topic: there are always going to be questions that prove or disprove the point.
There are a couple of good blog posts about the general guidance related to list and recommendation questions:
The takeaway from these posts is that questions need to teach someone something, not catalog opinions about something. So like many issues that are bound to come up, it's more nuanced than just banning or allowing all recommendation questions or list questions:
Before asking a question, we should consider not using "Recommend me a book about X", which isn't a very constructive question, and asking "What should I be focusing on when I'm learning about X?" or "How do I go about selecting resources for learning about X?"
Once the answers start coming in, do the answers actually provide useful information about why the recommendation is sound (ideally, a few paragraphs)? It's probably a good question that could be edited to make sure it doesn't become a honeypot for future bad answers.
Or are the answers merely a list of one line recommendations with no rationale for why one should look at it? Close the question as not constructive and start over, providing better guidance about what types of answers we're looking for here.
We should also take some cues from other sites on the network, and learning from their extended discussions about recommendation questions:
Most of the programming SE sites allow questions asking for "book or resource" recommendations. Examples from a number of SE sites:
Unless we can demonstrate how book recommendations are somehow fundamentally different on this site than the others (especially Judaism), I don't see how we can justify not allowing them here.
