Welcome to my rants

Just a place to record my displeasure at things. If you find it interesting or objectionable or amusing or in need of correction drop me a line

StackOverflow and 'closed as off-topic'

See this SO entry: Are there any good APIs to search for books via ISBN? [closed] I answered it as did one other person before it got closed. The reason is utterly ludicrous:
"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."

As is quite usual the answers are neither opinionated nor spam but instead provide useful information that the person asking the question can actually use.