Should there be textbook based forum channels?

[eprparadox]

Hello!

Often times I have specific questions about a book I'm self studying. And I'm sure either others have questions from that book or have already studied it and maybe posted questions.

It seems like organizing threads by textbook in physics would be a great way to reduce redundant threads from being created as well as allowing a more consolidated reference for specific texts.

Is this something in the works at all?

Thanks!

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Very interesting suggestion. One problem I can see is volume. Not only would we need to find and enter thousands of different textbooks, but I can imagine for many years not having many problems associated with the majority of textbooks.

This could be a good use of the tagging system though. However it's then difficult to standardize the tags. We could end up with 20 different tags for the same textbook. I will continue to think about it.

 

[eprparadox]

Hey, thanks for the quick response!

I definitely agree that there are thousands of textbooks store in your database. With that being said, it might be nice as a first version release to maybe add the top 25 that people can think of (eg, griffiths qm, e&m, taylor's mechanics, etc.)..just popular books that could be used a foundation to see if it's popular. I'll give that some more thought as well as to how this could be best organized because in an ideal scenario, you could also parse requests by chapter and whatnot but that just might not be feasible in the short term. I think I saw a github repo by someone who listed out physics textbooks in some sort of json or xml format. I'll see if I can find it. That might make it easier to import some textbooks if possible.

Thanks again!

 

[ZapperZ]

Unfortunately, this all assumes that people will actually READ or try to find similarly-posted questions first before posting. We already know that this isn't true, considering the number of people who still post HW-type questions in the wrong forum, despite the clear and frequent notices not to post in the main forums.

Zz.