Book recomendations/review forum

[mskeel]

Perhaps a section or sub-section for book recomendations and book reviews would be nice. Book reccomendations are scattered throuhgout the forum and that always seems to be one of the first questions a person asks: "Can anyone reccomend good books to help me learn X" (where X = windows API, beginner VB.net, Direct X, C++, VC++ .net, etc...)

 

This would be nice to have for a few reasons:

• It would bring all of the reccomendations people make into a single place (instead of smeared across more threads than can be counted)
• While reviews and such are avaiable on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the like, there are a lot of resources out there and it is often times difficult to know what to look for let alone pick a good resource. Reference materials are relatively expensive and the last thing anyone wants to do is drop $40 on something that isn't as useful as they thought it would be.
• Unlike reviews on Amazon which are aimed at earning a buck, reviews and recomendations on this site are for developers, by developers. I have come to know and trust the judgement of a few folks on this site and would take their recomendation for a book over a proffesional review whose sole purpose is to make me want to buy that book -- the opinion of someone I know who has actually used the resource is worth a lot.

[mskeel]

I just found this post on the same subject accidently some how. If I had known it was there I would have bumped it but there were only one post visible when I posted this suggestion. I guess this post was archived and not visible becuase I was logged in or something?

 

This idea seems to have a lot of support and been around since February. Why hasn't it happened yet?

[PlausiblyDamp]

From a personal point of view I like the idea of a forum for reviews. However one initial problem is the quantity / quality of reviews to begin with.

As an attempt to get something done I would suggest anyone who wishes to write a review post it in 'Random Thoughts' for now and as a short term measure they can be given a sticky to make them easier to find. If we get sufficient interest then a new forum can be created and the reviews moved to it as well as a moderation process put in place to mange it in the long term.