Whether you have only rudimentary web development skills, or are an expert developer, there are quite a few free sites that can help you extend your skills and learn new things. If you’re looking for education specific to, say, markup languages, CSS and the like, W3Schools is a good place to turn for exhaustive free lessons. However, if you’re looking for articles that can extend your development skills and projects in more general and theoretical ways, try Developer.com.

Developer.com offers articles aimed at web developers on topics including project management, Java, databases, and more. You can find many of the categories for topics running down the left rail of the site. There are also many web development videos available on the site, many of them tutorials on specific tasks.

In addition, you can use Developer.com’s articles in conjunction with W3Schools’ hands-on tutorials for a multi-faceted introduction to a particular development challenge. For example, you could use Developer.com’s in-depth database articles alongside W3Schools’ SQL tutorials.

Finally, I’m a fan of the webcasts on development topics and many other types of topics collected by Developer.com and Internet.com. Some of these are sponsored, so you have to register, and there is occasionally some bias evident toward this or that technology sponsor, but the vast majority of the webcasts are excellent.

Where do you turn to for articles on dev topics?

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It’s free to sign up at Expert Village (though you can view videos without signing up), and the site is search-driven. Do you use Photoshop? It’s one of the more complicated applications around if you really want to get good results.  Check out some of the nearly 900 tutorials for Photoshop found here. Via a toolbar, you can sift the tutorials by Most Viewed, Newest and Most Rated. This three-minute video on how to create a slick logo in Photoshop is taught by a professional graphic designer and thoroughly goes through all menu and dialog box choices needed to build a good-looking logo. It gets a thumbs-up from the community rating the videos, but some tutorials get thumbs-down ratings.

Are you a Firefox user? You can find almost 50 useful video tutorials on Expert Village for it, including one on exporting and saving bookmarks and one on finding good extensions for the browser.

Expert Village houses much less content on less popular applications. I couldn’t find any tutorials for a number of open source applications that I use, and I found only a handful of videos on Linux, with none on Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros.

It’s still worth searching Expert Village, though, if you’re looking for sophisticated content on advanced topics. I found good tutorials on web design, HTML and many other topics. Try the site out if you’re looking for short-format video tutorials on applications you use or want to use.

Where do you turn for tech tutorials?

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