user11538: Echoing the Physics Meta question and Math.Meta.SE on this topic, does Biology.SE have the will and use case for building a community list of books? Such a list has successfully been curated on the Physics.SE, and I would honestly appreciate this for Biology.SE. One can also see that there are some questions requesting for book recommendations on a variety of subjects. These observations suggest to me that there might be a want and use case, but I would appreciate the perspectives of others that have ideas about this option.

Do we need/want an overarching books question?


user22057: I am personally against book recommendation questions because it is generally very difficult to know at precisely what level a poster is at, and few of us have read enough books on a particular topic to be able to provide an objective recommendation. A list of books would have similar problems.
What I think might be useful is a list of sources of information for different areas covered in SE Biology, as is done in SE English Language and Usage, which I sometimes frequent. This would be mainly sources of Information on the Internet and would be to point people at who had not done their Homework before posting. However the problems I see with this are:

Getting People to do the work. My experience in trying to initiate something for Covid in January 2020 was not particularly encouraging. I could cover some aspects of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, but would anyone cover other areas?
Getting People to use it. They tend not to take kindly to being asked to go away and come back after they have done some research on a topic.


11538: <p>Echoing the <a href="https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5307/do-we-need-want-an-overarching-books-question">Physics Meta question</a> and <a href="https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/33804/do-we-need-want-an-overarching-books-question">Math.Meta.SE</a> on this topic, does Biology.SE have the will and use case for building a community list of books? <a href="https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations">Such a list has successfully been curated on the Physics.SE</a>, and I would honestly appreciate this for Biology.SE. One can also see that <a href="https://biology.stackexchange.com/search?q=book+recommendation">there are some questions requesting for book recommendations on a variety of subjects</a>. These observations suggest to me that there might be a want and use case, but I would appreciate the perspectives of others that have ideas about this option.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do we need/want an overarching books question?</p>
</blockquote>
 22057: <p>I am personally against book recommendation questions because it is generally very difficult to know at precisely what level a poster is at, and few of us have read enough books on a particular topic to be able to provide an objective recommendation. A list of books would have similar problems.</p>
<p>What I think might be useful is a list of sources of information for different areas covered in SE Biology, as is done in SE English Language and Usage, which I sometimes frequent. This would be mainly sources of Information on the Internet and would be to point people at who had not done their Homework before posting. However the problems I see with this are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Getting People to do the work. My experience in trying to initiate something for Covid in January 2020 was not particularly encouraging. I could cover some aspects of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, but would anyone cover other areas?</li>
<li>Getting People to use it. They tend not to take kindly to being asked to go away and come back after they have done some research on a topic.</li>
</ul>
