- W3 Schools – nice table-based summaries of many Internet technologies, most notably CSS and the HTML DOM. Warning: I’ve spotted one animated (with sound!) Flash ad on the site. AdBlock Plus for the win!
- w3c, the World Wide Web Consortium – the Big Cheese of web standards. Most useful: XHTML spec and HTML 4.01 spec.
- faqs.org – a nice clearinghouse of specifications. Most useful: list of active (non-obsolete) Internet RFCs.
- Borland’s Practical UML – a clean overview of the major UML diagrams, explaining what they mean and why they are useful
- php.net – the folks who publish PHP. The language docs are searchable online or can be downloaded in many formats.
- my Software Best Practices document – I’m not trying to toot my own horn, merely point out that I refer to (and update) this a fair bit to keep myself focused
- Notepad++ – the best light-weight Windows-based open-source text editor I’ve found.
- XHTML character entity table – was it &rarr or &rArr? This will tell you.
- Jakob Nielsen’s useability site – sometimes useless, sometimes fantastic, but full of intriguing ideas about interface design
- Common fonts available on Windows and Mac OS – handy for picking fonts that most everyone will have
- the Boost C++ libraries – auto pointers, weak references, algorithms, template meta-programming, it’s all here. Well-written, free, and a great open development process. These guys are tight with the C++ standards committee, so a lot of what is going into C++ TR1 came from the Boost library.
- Recommended for any experienced C/C++ programmer:
- Effective C++, by Scott Meyers – one of the few C++ books I’d recommend to everyone. 90% of the content is immediately useful, the descriptions are concise and readable, and brief examples are liberally interspersed among the text.
- The Design and Evolution of C++, by Bjarne Stroustrup – a concise and technical description of how and why C++ was invented, evolved, and what the language’s creator has to say about it. It may not be immediately relevant to your immediate work, but will help you understand why C++ does what it does. Example quote:
in real use, implicit conversion has sometimes proven tricky to use. However, providing the full set of mixed-mode operations isn’t pretty either. I would like a better solution, but of the solutions I know, implicit conversions is the least bad.
- More Effective C++, by Scott Meyers – not as good as the first (and, unfortunately, usually more expensive), but still useful.
Have any useful links to suggest? Please post them in a comment.
