I am posting this question just to get a better understanding of the questions that can be asked on Stack Overflow.
I find that Language Books/Tutorials for popular languages can several answers based on users opinion and cause a discussion.
Why is this a good question when several other requests for books and tutorials are not acceptable?
If you explore the archives, you'll notice a lot of these types of questions. Just browsing the top 5 all-time rep users' top questions/answers turned up these, which would all be considered bad questions on today's Stack Overflow:
You'll notice that these questions are mostly more than a few years old; and have been closed as off topic or not constructive.
Even though those types of open-ended questions generate some really interesting content, you can imagine why the powers that be outlawed them, as they distract attention from the core purpose of a Q-and-A site.
The questions you're linking to are extremely old. Question constraints were more lax back then, in part because there was a lot less traffic. The first question used to have a disclaimer on it that said something along the lines of "This is not a good example of a Stackoverflow question; it's being preserved because blah blah blah."
