Re: Non-Midrange resources kind of like Midrange dot Com

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Gerald Kern <jp2558@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Never heard of Solidworks or Serverfault but I will check those out.

I've heard of (and used) Stack Overflow - is that part of Stack Exchange?

Stack Overflow was the first Stack Exchange site. Actually, the rest
of Stack Exchange grew out of the success of Stack Overflow. Server
Fault is also in that family, and is basically analogous to Stack
Overflow, but for sysadmins instead of programmers.

And I've been reluctant to join Experts Exchange but based on your comment
I may have to pony up. Does their membership require annual renewal?

It does. They have a free 30-day trial, though. And they even have a
permanent free tier, but it's so crippled as to be nearly worthless.

Stack Overflow was actually created specifically to compete with
Experts Exchange, which they've done very successfully. In fact, SO
was kind of *too* successful, and they've had to adjust their policies
and narrow their focus, in an effort to keep the volume on the site
manageable. (For example, you used to be able to ask open-ended or
opinion-based questions like "what's the best free IDE?" or "what are
some gotchas for Java programmers learning Python?", but these are
discouraged and usually closed on SO nowadays.)

You can read about the sordid and kind of wild history of EE (and
maybe glean a bit of its relationship with SO) here:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92683/what-experts-exchange-thinks-of-stack-overflow

If you need to ask questions that don't fit the Stack Exchange model,
one free option is Reddit. (Disclaimer: I have never posted to Reddit
and have only very occasionally read anything on Reddit.)

John Y.