Feature Request: Add an automated list of major books recommended throughout the Odin curriculum to the website

[Kezy-d4]

Checks

• I have thoroughly read and understand The Odin Project Contributing Guide
• The title of this issue follows the Feature Request: brief description of feature request format, e.g. Feature Request: Add a dark mode to the website
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Description of the Feature Request

Please refer to this Discord conversation for important context: https://discord.com/channels/505093832157691914/1355281283747676391

There are several full-length books recommended throughout the Odin curriculum, usually as an additional resource. Examples include 99 Bottles Of OOP and Think Like A Programmer.

In the website's footer, there exists collections of useful resources; I'm referring to the Installation Guides and Community Guides. Similar to these collections, it may be useful to add a collection of each major book recommended throughout the Odin curriculum and feature it in the website's footer. The books should be listed in the same order in which they appear in the curriculum. The list should also mention and link to the exact lesson where each particular book was featured.

Automating such a list via the Style Guide would alleviate the manual maintenance/syncing work required from the team.

While I think such a collection would be valuable and convenient, I can imagine a potential issue: it may distract from the main curriculum itself, as we want to encourage learners to take the curriculum in order and as structured.
This could be remedied by including a prominent disclaimer/note atop the list emphasizing that it is merely meant as a reference and is supplementary, and learners should avoid skipping ahead to a book they haven't naturally encountered yet in the curriculum.

Acceptance criteria

• The collection is automated and does not require manual maintenance/syncing work from the team
• A disclaimer is included emphasizing that the collection is meant merely as a reference and is supplementary, and learners should avoid skipping ahead to a book they haven't naturally encountered yet in the curriculum
• The collection lists each major book recommended by TOP in the same order as they appear in the curriculum
• For each book, the collection mentions and links to the exact lesson where the book was featured in the curriculum

Additional Comments

No response

[mao-sz]

How exactly could the style guide be used to "mark" something as a book? The only thing I can think of is wrapping a link to a book in a span with a predetermined class. But there would be no way to enforce that via markdownlint, even for a custom rule, because there would be no way to know what links are actually to whole books or other things (context-based rule) and no way to catch when a link that is to a book isn't written with the special syntax.

So even if someone was to go through the whole curriculum and add spans to existing books, should any books be added for whatever reason, there's a very high chance it gets added without the right syntax and not caught by anyone because there it won't be lint-checkable.

[KevinMulhern]

Thanks for the suggestion @Kezy-d4, I've converted this to a discussion until we've settled on if it's something we want to do or not.

This has been suggested a few times on chat, but we've never seen the real value in the effort of doing and maintaining it. What kind of use cases/situations do you think would justify this feature? - what problem would it solve for our learners?

[Kezy-d4]

Hi, and thanks for considering my suggestion.

I think the primary problem the feature would solve is as follows:
The books recommended by TOP in the additional resources sections are usually very long and reading them can be a demanding commitment for the learner to make when already working through the TOP curriculum. As a result, the learner may choose to continue with the curriculum in the immediate term, but wish to return and give the book a read at some later date. In this case, making a consolidated list of the books available for reference would prevent the learner needing to manually scour the curriculum for the books they'd like to return to.

As for just how useful the feature would really be, I suppose that is up for debate. I understand the learner could simply add the book to their own reading list, after all. That said, the list may be worth featuring on the website due to the sheer value of the books as a supplementary resource.

[KevinMulhern]

Thanks for writing that up! I think it makes a lot of sense. I'd like others on the team to weigh in, but I personally wouldn't be against exploring the approach we'd take with this, and ways to make it sustainable to maintain like the stuff @MaoShizhong mentioned.