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Developer.com Delivers Solid Articles on Dev Topics

Samuel Dean — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:00:11 +0000

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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5 Free Online Answer Sites for Tech Questions

Samuel Dean — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:00:34 +0000

One of the problems with working from home or otherwise outside an office environment is that you don’t always have access to help with technology questions. What do you do if you’re trying to learn HTML 5 and have a question? What if you have a web design question but there’s nobody there to provide an answer? The good news is that there are a lot of good, free resources for technology help online, and you usually don’t have to wait long for good answers. Here are five good resources for next time you have a tech conundrum.

Try the forums. For anyone who works on the web, the free forums at W3Schools are terrific for getting speedy responses from people who know what they’re talking about. There is a “General” forum for questions of any type, but most of the popular forums are on web development and design topics. You’ll find forums on HTML, JavaScript, using Flash and other multimedia tools online, and more. Also, as I’ve written before, the free tutorials at W3Schools’ home page are really outstanding.

Protonic.com. I’ve found many good answers to my tech questions at protonic.com. It’s populated by a large community of volunteers who answer questions, and answers usually come back quite quickly, although you sometimes have to wait a few hours for a question to be “picked up” by the community. You can ask questions on anything from HTML to what hardware to buy and get good responses.

You must log in and provide a valid email address to ask a question. The service is completely free.

Open source questions? If you use any open source applications, from Firefox, to the GIMP graphics application, to Linux, to many more titles, you can always ask a question at OStatic. Just log in and click on “Question” in the toolbar above the OStatic blog to type your question in. OStatic is partly a blog, but also a database-driven site with an active community of open source users. Usually, they provide excellent answers to questions on open source apps and platforms.

Hit the help desk. At AskMeHelpDesk, you can get free answers to tech questions. The site houses many categories for questions, and not all of them are on technology topics, but there are many experts available who can answer questions on everything form web development to smartphones.

Weegy. Recently, I wrote a post about Weegy, which is a human expert-driven search site. I’ve asked many complex technology-related questions of the experts there, and the free answers are often very good. At the site, you post a question and wait for an expert to claim it. Usually, answers come back very quickly.

While the answers you get from these resources will usually be high quality, it’s important to fact-check them. Using Google, you can usually establish the accuracy or inaccuracy of any given answer. You can also post the same question in multiple forums and compare the answers you get.

What free resouces do you turn to when you have a tech question?

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4 Free Resources for Quick Site and App Development

Samuel Dean — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:42 +0000

Over the weekend, I was talking about web application development to a retired friend who was once a top programmer. He doesn’t do a lot of programming anymore, and remarked that application development tools for the web are so fragmented that it’s difficult to stay on top of the various languages and tools that are available. For example, he expressed some interest in learning Flash and AJAX, but didn’t know where to start.

In this post, I’ll cover four free, good resources for easy-to-digest web application development tools, templates and training.

I’ve mentioned W3Schools before. The site recently got an interface overhaul making it much easier to navigate. As always, the good thing about this site is that you can access many compact, accessible tutorials on everything from Flash to AJAX to PHP, but unlike many similar offerings, you actually publish your test attempts to web pages and see what the results look like. You’ll find the many application development lessons housed at the site running down the left and right rails of the home page.

Down the right rail of W3Schools, there is a sub-site full of examples of pages built using JavaScript, AJAX, CSS and many more tools. For example, at this page, you’ll find links that take you to CSS-controlled portions of pages, where you can see before and after snapshots of how CSS was applied in each case.

My programmer friend was particularly interested in putting together a couple of Flash sites. For those who are unfamiliar with Flash but want to get simple templates and tools to work with, the Lite version of TrendyFlash is a good place to start. You can take a look at user-rated, user-built sample sites done with TrendyFlash here, and it’s easy to convert pages you build to Flash presentations. (W3Schools also provides a complete Flash tutorial, including a good lesson on Flash animation.)

Do you need design input for a site? Mike Gunderloy has covered Open Source Designs here. It provides over 2,000 web site designs, with the majority of them XHTML/CSS-based. It’s a proven way to get a site going with a good theme, look and platform to build on. In a similar vein to Open Source Designs, look into Open Designs. This site relies a group of open source site designers from around the world providing thousands more XHTML- and CSS- based free web design templates for downloading. Everything at these sites is free.

Between W3Schools, the example applications linked to there, and the free resources for good looking designs, it’s easy to take advantage of cutting-edge tools without necessarily mastering development and design languages and environments from end to end. Sometimes simply picking and choosing what will work for your site goes a long way.

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Tips On Using W3Schools' Web Development Tutorials

Samuel Dean — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:27 +0000

I’ve written before about one of my favorite sites on the web for quickly learning web development skills: W3Schools. All of the tutorials housed at the site are free, and they’re designed to equip you with useful skills very quickly, so that you don’t have to become a complete expert on, say, CSS (cascading style sheets) in order to start getting impressive results with it. The site has added quite a lot of good tutorials and is worth a visit even if you’ve been there before.

Here are some tips on how to get good results out of W3Schools.

Try Hands-On Examples. Recently, an old friend contacted me about wanting to change styles and layouts on his web site, but he didn’t know exactly how to go about it. I directed him to W3Schools’ CSS tutorial, found here. It lets you build your own CSS examples and publish them to see how your results will look. For example, here is an example of script for changing background colors, where you can enter your own variations. This allowed my friend to get what he wanted done without learning everything about CSS. W3Schools has hands-on tutorials like this for AJAX, PHP, JavaScript, and much more.

Look For Cutting-Edge Tutorials. The tutorials at W3Schools get regularly updated, and you can even find tutorials on development tools that are working revisions of existing standards, such as this one on HTML 5. You can also validate any pages where you may feel you don’t grasp all of the underlying tools you’re using, as seen here. The examples at the site also get updates. You can find many good AJAX examples here.

Use the Reference Guides. W3Schools provides a lot more than just tutorials. You can find full reference guides to W3C standards such as HTML, XML and more. For example, even if you’re an HTML whiz, you may still appreciate this quick reference. Or, take a look at this reference to PHP Array Functions.

W3Schools has thousands of tutorials, so it’s worth spending some time digging into many of them. I’ve used the site many times to quickly pick up a new skill or solve a problem on a site.

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