was created today on Stack Overflow and is being applied to older posts. Is this tag a helpful tag and should it be applied to older posts?

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I noticed this earlier. It's the name of a book, not a meta-tag. That said, I still question the validity of the tag. –  Mysticial Dec 18 '12 at 10:00
Well, it means the question contains contents from the book or asking something about those contents so yes, I would say it's OK to use. –  Shadow Wizard Dec 18 '12 at 10:02
Got it. It seems fine to create tags on book names. –  Aziz Shaikh Dec 18 '12 at 10:23
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1 Answer

up vote 12 down vote accepted

I'm not in favor of this use of tags.

Yes, we do have a few book tags like . But these are notable books. Unless you can demonstrate that "Learn C the Hard Way" is in the same league as, say, Kernighan and Ritchie, allowing such tags opens the door for a tag for every possible book title, and the shoddy questions that follow ("What does this sentence in this book mean?").

Tags are not designed for this. Tags are meant to categorize questions, not to identify specific artifacts like book titles, motherboard part numbers, or even specific software versions except under certain narrow circumstances.

If you really have a question about something in a particular book like "Learn You a Haskell," just put the book title in the question.

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To be fair, sicp only has 137 questions. I don't even know that book deserves it. Maybe the GoF, but in the end, it's just all too subjective. I think we should probably not have specific book tags altogether. We have the same problem when trying to create lists of books and vote on them. What do those votes mean? The point being, we don't have a solid definition of what "notable" is, so we shouldn't have book tags, period. –  casperOne Dec 18 '12 at 17:13
Also, we kind of endorsed books having their own tags. Apparently, we might have to revisit it. –  casperOne Dec 18 '12 at 17:15
Worth noting: it appears that Reto Meier never bothered to create the tag for his book. –  Robert Harvey Dec 18 '12 at 17:21
Given that question is more than six months old, it's quite possible that there was only ever one question with it and the reaper took care of it. That or it was otherwise mysteriously disappeared. By force. –  Charles Dec 18 '12 at 20:24
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