There have been quite a few book-recommendation/reference-request questions lately. Some of them have been closed and even deleted while others have remained open.
I'm curious on what the site policy is, and I'd like to limit this discussion to
whether all textbook/reference recommendation questions, or a subset of them, are too broad/open-ended for the site
(it's possible that some were closed and deleted as duplicates, although I will probably post another question on meta about deletion policy).
To start the discussion, here are two questions that motivated this meta post:
- Introductory biology text for an outsider [open]
- https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/35335/reference-request-regarding-biomathematics-theoretical-biology [now closed]
In particular, I'm curious why [1] is open and [2] is closed, as [1] is arguably more general than [2].