Stack Overflow is a great resource for programmers. It’s not a question-and-answer site, not a site for finding help. It’s a site for the community to collect knowledge from one another, a collection of interesting, insightful, entertaining questions. SO is a place where users from around the world come to share their knowledge and learn from each other. It’s a place where programmers come together. It’s a community.
Stack Overflow has been created by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. He started the site in 2008 and it’s since grown to become a major community resource for programmers everywhere.
This site is a great place to find answers. Stack Overflow makes it easy to search for the question or answer you need and, more importantly, the people who have already given the correct answer. Stack Overflow has been around for just over seven years now, but it’s already an important part of the programming community.
What is a Question?
On Stack Overflow, every question must be on-topic for Stack Overflow. This means that the question must be in the area of expertise that Stack Overflow covers. This could mean any number of things. The most obvious one would be code-related questions, but there’s a wider variety of questions that are on-topic. As a result, there are lots of different types of questions.
This is one of the reasons why Stack Overflow is so useful: it has lots of questions and answers. Stack Overflow has been around for seven years now and the site has almost 11 million questions and more than five million answers, all of which have been provided by thousands of users.
How to Ask a Question?
The biggest key to asking a good question is to do your research first. Research is a big part of programming. This site is about solving problems for other people, so you should always be trying to find the answer.
It doesn’t matter if you’re working on an assignment or working for your own pleasure, you should always be researching your problem to see if you’re right. The moment you feel that you have the answer, you should post a question and wait for the answer.
You’ll find that many questions already have answers. These answers can be found on Stack Overflow. The people who have provided the answer should be rewarded for their answer by the community, but this is very rare. You should search through the posts and find the answer. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the answer already. Write it out to be clear to people and then use the search bar to find more answers.
The right type of questions and answers
The community on Stack Overflow provides a useful set of answers for many programming questions. It has to be said though, that a question isn’t asked just for the purpose of getting it answered. A question is asked because it provides a useful answer and that question should have some sort of benefit to the site. If the community thinks the question is too broad, then it can be closed or down voted. But if the community thinks that the question should be answered, then it should be provided with a useful answer.
When writing a question you should think about the best use of the question. It should be used to provide a useful answer to the problem. Here’s a quick checklist:
- Consider if the question has enough detail and if it has been asked before.
- Look for a useful answer and it should provide the answer for your problem.
- Don’t provide a duplicate question because the answer to the question shouldn’t be the same as the answer provided by another question.
- Create a separate question for every your question.
It might not seem that way, but the more detailed the question the easier it is for the community to provide a useful answer. Questions with an answer can be used to find questions that are of interest and then these can be down voted. Questions without an answer can be down voted and closed. Some questions are better off closed…