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Freely available programming books

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110 pointsralphchurch29 comments

"This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site"

This is sad.

We need to set stack exchange free. The community failed in creating a free and open environment for asking and answering questions: A place where information may be categorized but never restricted even if it's bad. To be bad it must exist first, if you restrict the existence of crap, it won't be crap anymore, because it won't exist.

Stack exchange is a walled garden run by members blindly following a doctrine put in place to increase revenue in the first place.

I agree with many of your points. Some of the StackExchange sites have degenerated into being virtually unusable unless you align yourself with the small group of people who viciously down-vote and close otherwise useful and relevant questions. The idea is/was great, but in some corners it seems to be starting to derail.

Yes, you have to agree with the groupthink or you are basically an outcast. That said, I think it is still very useful.

I mean on some level I think it's sort of stupid. The original idea always centered around SO being a blog for programmers that don't really blog; at least that was what was constantly talked about. However, any question or answer that contains any semblance of personality is struck down or edited to an extreme. It's really anal retention run amok. But it's still useful. :)

> The original idea always centered around SO being a blog for programmers that don't really blog; at least that was what was constantly talked about.

I used to listen to the early podcasts and I never got this impression. As far as I can tell SO has always been run much the same way - aimed at getting the top google hit for direct questions like "how do I make my button transparent." For the most part they are succeeding. Questions like "list of freely available programming books" have always been outliers.

Now that they are not allowed at all, maybe the old ones should be hidden instead of being shown as "locked."

StackExchange is an SEO company, not your blog hosting company. Just because you find a topic interesting does not mean it is their job to host your discussion/poll/list-of-lists etc. for it.

For some reason I don't see SO as having degraded as much as some of the other SE properties.

No, go back and listen. The blog thing was always there. It was a part of Atwoods general opinion that people are better off if they are totally in the public.

Nuuton will allow you to have the ability to discuss such subjects directly without such policies. You may even discuss the actual stackoverflow site if so desired (or the book homepages).

Interesting, I'm not familiar with that. The fact is SE sites have such a large user base and for the most part I'm not sure the problems it has are significant enough to give much room to new players, unless it is something really remarkable.

It does not compete with SE, because its a search engine. But it does allow for people to discuss items on SE without the friction they create (as an example). You can also do so with other site (actually, all sites).

I agree with you. However, this is not like something that has "failed" in the sense that this sort of mindset was always prevalent from the Beta of SO. This is just Jeff Atwood's philosophy plain and simple. I don't think it is, as you say, put in place to increase revenue, I think it was sort of "control freak" mindset that Jeff Atwood displayed (love it or hate it). I don't know how much Joel agreed with him on this sort of stuff in the beginning but the inane amount of micromanagement, brow beating questioners, etc was always there. You can go back to the old podcasts and blog posts for that. In the beginning, for a long time, there was push back, I felt like even in the SO blog comments there would be 25% disagreement with this idea, but I think the collective has "gotten out of control" (if you think it is bad thing). I remember long discussions on the podcast about whether some such question was relevant enough to stay on the site.

I always thought Programmers SE was just evidence of this silliness; I saw and still see no reason for it to exist outside of SO. But that's the way it goes.

Yes I often find myself wishing that, at the user level at least, USENET was still all pervasive. However, that is probably remembering the past a little more fondly that I should. Joel even talks a little about the comparison here [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-...].

Many of the best questions on Stack Overflow end up "closed as not constructive." I get that it keeps the site on-topic, but it's a shame when a really productive and amazing discussion gets shut down arbitrarily.

It's been said every time this argument is brought up: StackOverflow is a Q&A website. It's not meant for discussions, and while some interesting questions get closed, it's not arbitrary at all.

"We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion."

He's asking for free books about programming. When someone answers with a book, it's super-easy to verify that it is a book, is about programming, and is free.

It might be a bad fit for SO because there isn't one answer that is "more correct" than all other answers and so on, or something like that. But it is not a question that leads to arguing and extended discussion. It's a question that leads to people posting links to free books about programming.

So like, it might not be arbitrary and it might be that all the right questions are being closed, but it looks like a bunch of deletionists flailing about, knocking shit over. And it looks like that because there's this canned "reason" for closing a question, and it is often a poor match for the question being closed. Not because people don't get that SO is "not meant for discussions".

It at least definitely leads to polling. Everyone and their capuchin being able to just throw in theirs as a legit answer. When there is no chance for a canonical answer at all, that's a bad question.

I've got 7K+ rep there (hardly a high-score) but I don't really like the site anymore due to arbitrary behavior of mods.

It wasn't even a "discussion" (specifically forbidden because independent thoughts and points or view are something frowned upon on SO, which is bent on crushing individuality)... Just a friggin' good list.

The really pathetic behavior of SO mods starts when they see people criticizing SO (and leaving or rage-quitting SO) and then try to say: "Do not speak about it here (e.g. on HN), bring this to meta".

Yeah. Sure. Meta is even worse than SO ; )

As a result of this crazy mod behavior people, like me, are quitting and stop helping others on that medium.

It's not that big of an issue that said because something, one day, will rise just as fast as SO did and shall have fixed the arbitrariness of SO mods behavior / rules.

A pet-peeve of mine is that they clearly said on SO (on Meta) that it was OK to rewrite a question entirely so that the question fits a totally bogus response (totally bogus response of course made by a user with lots of rep).

When I saw that non-sense I realized it was time for me to quit.

Yeah, I have similar feelings. I have more rep and at the time my usage dipped it was a fairly high number, but far less than people like Jon Skeet. I stopped answering and engaging a few years ago. It just seemed like at some point enough LRH (or JA, if you like) tech was disseminated on the site that even very good participants on SO that dared to have different opinions were relegated to SO's version of RPF or just deemed SPs altogether. :)

Your post pretty much echoes what I could say about my time at Super User - I made it to about 13K before realising I was expected to play by JA's rules or shut up - so I 'quit' about 14 months ago.

Your username seems familiar. Are you also the same linker3000 who was outside of the shipping district for some of Jeff Atwood's personal free stuff he happened to use Super User to give away to? http://meta.superuser.com/questions/3720/three-free-video-ca... You left shortly after that. Were those the rules you're talking about?

The problem is that the Q&A format is a very bad to ask for list of things. A "wiki" would be a much better format to have list of things that everyone can contribute to. Q&A is also a very bad format for discussion. Traditional forum, Reddit or Quora are much better choice for discussion. It's a simple mater of using the best tools for the best job.

It occurs to me--I don't think there's any real "social site" focused on making lists. The closest things we have are social bookmarking tools--but those have a ranking algorithm that highly weights novelty, causing the front page to resemble a stream of ephemeral content mixed with periodic reposts of evergreen content.

---

How could we improve on this?

[Anyone who wants to do the following is welcome to; I've too many startups on the go already.]

Imagine something like Reddit--with each list being a "subreddit"--but:

A. there's no time-weighting in the front-page algorithm (though there is a "new" page); and

B. there are robust mechanisms in place for preventing duplicate entries from being created, and merging duplicates (along with their votes and comments) into the canonical versions.

Additionally, since the lists created will be far more static, you might want to give people greater influence over the ranking system--using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting_systems, for example.

Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

> Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

In many countries A - F grading system is not commonly used. For example in the country where I was born they use 1 - 5 grading system and A - F means nothing. I think rating with stars is much more widespread and would be wiser choice for any project with global ambitions.

That's an interesting idea. One of the things we are building is a "reddit like system"[1], and so I could see building a feature like that. Our current focus is on enterprise usage, though, not building something for the public web. But the code is all Open Source, ALv2 licensed and it's done in Groovy and Grails. If anyone is interested on hacking on something like that with us, just shout.

[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

I love this idea. Currently my search for, say, a new IRC client is likely to end up on Wikipedia of all places because they're the only people that have a comprehensive list of what's available. There has got to be a better way to do this.

It seems like it would be hard to find additional content after the easier targets are taken up. Once people have put up lists of what they find useful, new lists or useful additions to the list wouldn't appear every day. It might be a good curated reference, but I have a hard time seeing an active community based around it. Maybe you need to expand the scope of the site idea?

Yeah, but really that was kind of the idea in the beginning. It was to be this Wikipedia-like destination but it was all these subtle micro-management decisions that pushed it away from this.

On some level it is silly to put such constraints.

Nice work ralph

Nice! Thanks for sharing!

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