Reading this question (now with a bounty) I find that in other StackExchange site I would have flagged it as off-topic, specifically with the definition
Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Are this type of question on-topic in this community?
Sorry for the late response, I never saw this come through my little Meta Alert thinger... (Metalert? No? Okay...)
Generally, I'd say no, they're too broad. However, this is something we're currently exploring as a community to decide exactly what we want to be doing. Do we want to allow recommendations style questions? If so, how do we want to go about doing so in an orderly manner?
So I would say no, currently they are not. In the future they may be, but we would have to reach a concensus about what limits would be placed on such questions and at this point in time we have not. However, this topic is the perfect place for a such a discussion to occur, so thank you for bringing it up!
