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by zerobits 1886 days ago
I find the awesome lists not to be that useful. Mainly because they seem to include way too many things.

Rather than 10 library/book/etc. recommendations on every topic, I'd love just a few: "Best beginner book" .. "Best advanced book" and a few alternatives.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get very different results or value from just Googling the same topics.

5 comments

That's a problem I've noticed in two areas: programming resources and travel.

They tend to dump all the information and just state the facts. Very few make specific recommendations and the reasoning behind it.

Yeah, I think some light editorializing would help here even if the list content stayed the same.
Ugh, 10 most... Never ever google anything “Top 10” or “10 most ...”. It is filled to the brim with blog spam and autogen articles. Never search “Top” anything on YouTube. You’ll get the bottom of the barrel content. SEO has ruined it for all and forever.
I'd highlight another aspect of these lists.

Although I don't find them too much useful either, it's good that there is _something_ which is "curated", so when I point a newbie to it, they can start looking around for alternative solutions / implementations / products-projects of a particular topic.

And when I say "newbie", sometimes, surprisingly, that can mean an experienced professional, who just wasn't exposed to that particular topic ever before...

These lists certainly have the risk of being too opinionated, and the reader being mislead into one or the other direction, so definitely have to be taken with a grain of salt.

I guess the problem with baking it down to "the best x" is that it's too subjective. At least if there's a few choices, and people can add to them relatively easily (a PR with little friction) people can kind of choose the best for them.
I don't look at it as a place to answer "What is the best way to do X" type questions but more "What else is out there that can X".