free tutorials Have you ever read through a chapter in one of those Learn Such and Such in 21 Seconds books and realized that somewhere along the way you had started daydreaming about how you would spend a trillion dollars if you were Bill Gates? Well, it happens to me all the time. Computer books are boring. In fact, most technical writing out there bites the big one and there's no sign that the situation is going to get any better in the near future. The really unfortunate thing about this predicament is that now, more than any other period in the history of computing, is when we really need good, clear writing out there. Whether the established priesthood of computer science likes it or not, the web has opened the flood gates and computer science is being secularized post haste. Well, the fact is that most people learning how to make a living on the web are not morons and if given the proper instructions can do just about everything they want to with their web sites, if not more.
» 30 More Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download Positive Space 30 More Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download It has taken me almost an entire year to compile, but I have finally created a followup entry to the original “30 Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download” Article. The original was the most popular article I have ever posted on this blog receiving well over 500,000 unique views – fueled by twitter referrals and stumble upon. Free eBooks & Manifestos Get a Design Job! Taking Your Talent to the Web – Jeffery Zeldman 279 Days to Overnight Success – Chris Guillebeau The Vignelli Cannon – Massimo Vignelli The Bootstrapper’s Bible – Seth Godin Testify: How Remarkable Organizations are Creating Customer Evangelists – Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design – Stephen Hay A Call to Arms: Twelve Proclamations of a Win Without Pitching Agency Ten Tests of Your Positioning Presentations Icon Design – Jon Hicks Design Control – Khoi Vinh Writing Maintainable CSS – Natalie Downe
12 Absolutely and Insanely Essential Utilities For Programmers In every era in recent times there has been one profession that for a short while you could enter without formal training. Autodidacts in the 19th century could read the law without recourse to formal education (see Abe Lincoln). In the early 20th century it was aviation. For a short while in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was computing, thanks to the release of the Apple IIe, the IBM PC and the Mac. Were it not for that Window® of opportunity, I hate to think what would have become of me. (Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?) As much as I continue to love to code 30 years later, there are a few aspects I hate: Doing a mundane task more than onceNot remembering how i fixed this problem in the pastLosing work to crashed disks or stupid irreversible revisionsNot being able to find subtle text differences in files. Hence, my 12 essential utilities…. Before We Begin I assume you have (and use)… If not, stop reading this list and go get em. # 1. That is, you type less and end up with better code.
120 Tips, Tricks, and Tuts from 2009 Worth your Time Now that we’re down to the end of 2009, what were some of the best web development and design tutorials and articles from the year? We’ll take a look at 120 of them! Jump to a Month January How to Build a Login System for a Simple Website In today’s video tutorial, we’ll be building a login system with PHP and MYSQL. Run Your Own TinyURL Service With Phurl Jan 13th, 2009 in Other by Thord Hedengren URL shortening services are a must if microblogging services like Twitter are to work. Slice and Dice that PSD In today’s video tutorial, we’ll be slicing up a PSD, dicing it for the web, and serving it on a warm hot plate. The Definitive Guide to Creating a Practical jQuery Plugin In this article weíre going to be building our very own jQuery plugin step-by-step from scratch; jQuery makes this task exceptionally easy for us, giving us a simple method of packaging up our scripts and exposing their functionality, and encouraging the use of scalable and reusable object-oriented techniques. February
The Tao Of Programming Translated by Geoffrey James Transcribed by Duke Hillard Transmitted by Anupam Trivedi, Sajitha Tampi, and Meghshyam Jagannath Re-html-ized and edited by Kragen Sittler Last modified 1996-04-10 or earlier Table of Contents Book 1 - The Silent Void Thus spake the master programmer: ``When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.'' Something mysterious is formed, born in the silent void. If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. The Tao of Programming flows far away and returns on the wind of morning. The Tao gave birth to machine language. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Each language has its purpose, however humble. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it. In the beginning was the Tao. Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. How could it be otherwise? The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The highest sounds are hardest to hear.
10 CSS Snippets to Save Precious Time | Blog Oh Blog Today, I have compiled a set of 10 CSS snippets that can save you a lot of time and effort. These codes are needed frequently when developing CSS-based websites or themes. Just bookmark these codes (Ctrl + D) so that you don’t have to look for them on the Internet every time. 1. Through this code, you can have your own tooltips using just CSS. Now, use the tooltips like this :- [html] Easy TooltipThis is the crazy little Easy Tooltip Text.. 2. HTML tags on different browsers have their own formatting and styling. 3. This code will add different color borders around your assets depending on its level. 4. You can easily center a DIV by using margin:auto; property when you have mentioned its width in your CSS. 5. Instead of using any kind of JavaScript to add a loading icon before your large image is loaded, you can use this simple CSS technique. 6. In case you need to preload images before the loading of your page completes, use the following technique. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Free Books A lot of people keep asking about a good list of programming books. Hence, we are building this list to save your time and to spread the knowledge. Some of these books will definitely help us to evolve our coding skills and thought processes for developing better solutions. We will do our best to keep updating this list, hope you find this list useful, here we go. Meta-List Graphics Programming Language Agnostic: NerdDinner Walkthrough Assembly Language: Bash Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide See .NET below Django Djangobook.com Emacs The Emacs manual Thanks Emacser (October 17, 2010) Forth Git Haskell Dive Into HTML5 Java JavaScript Linux Advanced Linux Programming Lisp Lua Programming In Lua (for v5 but still largely relevant) Maven Mercurial NoSQL CouchDB: The Definitive Guide Objective-C The Objective-C Programming Language Parrot / Perl 6 Perl 6 (Work in progress) Perl PowerShell Mastering PowerShell Prolog PostgreSQL Practical PostgreSQL Python Learn REBOL Thanks Nick (October 19, 2010) Ruby Scala Scheme Smalltalk Subversion Vim
Build Internet! | Web Design, Development, and Business 20 Methods for Upping Your Current Web Design Skills Design All great designers are constantly improving their skills. There has never been a successful designer, or anyone of another profession for that matter, that has stopped at a certain point and said, "Good enough". Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to always be learning new things, and to always be improving. In this post we're looking into 20 different ways a web designer can improve their skills at any time. 20 Great Improvement Methods 1. Check out websites like UI-Patterns.com to explore the best user interface patterns for the web. User Interface Pattern Websites: 2. Look at the detail in everyday objects, and actively look at detail in other web designs. 3. Many clients love a designer that offers SEO services. 4. Trends are never something a web designer should solely rely on, but learning new trends is a great way to keep up with technology, and to keep you as a designer out of a rut. 5. 6. Image credit: Dey 7. 8. 9. Image credit: Jakob Montrasio 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Speed Up with CSS3 Gradients This article was originally published on March 2, 2010. It was updated April 1, 2011, July 20, 2011, and again March 3, 2014, each time to clarify and correct browser prefixes and best practices. Just as you can declare the background of an element to be a solid color in CSS, you can also declare that background to be a gradient. Using gradients declared in CSS, rather using an actual image file, is better for control and performance. Gradients are typically one color that fades into another, but in CSS you can control every aspect of how that happens, from the direction to the colors (as many as you want) to where those color changes happen. Let's go through it all. Gradients are background-image While declaring the a solid color uses background-color property in CSS, gradients use background-image. Linear Gradient Perhaps the most common and useful type of gradient is the linear-gradient(). Not declaring an angle will assume top-to-bottom: This "to" syntax works for corners as well. like:
Product ZK Framework ZK Framework ZK is a highly productive open source Java web framework for building amazing enterprise web and mobile applications. Its unique Sever+client Fusion architecture enable developers to write applications using pure Java, design UI in XML while having optional control to the client side. ZK’s true event-driven model reflects desktop programming shielding developers from JavaScript programming, cross-browser issues, complex Ajax communication and the danger of exposing business logic. ZK affords developers the ability to write one application and have it provide an optimal user experience on any kind of device from the desktop to tablets and smartphones without the need for a separate component set. Application Components ZK Charts ZK Charts is a component providing a huge library of interactive charts which can be embedded in your Java Web Applications. Tools Community Collaboration Extensions
10 sql tips to speed up your database Design your database with caution This first tip may seems obvious, but the fact is that most database problems come from badly-designed table structure. For example, I have seen people storing information such as client info and payment info in the same database column. For both the database system and developers who will have to work on it, this is not a good thing. When creating a database, always put information on various tables, use clear naming standards and make use of primary keys.Source: Know what you should optimize If you want to optimize a specific query, it is extremely useful to be able to get an in-depth look at the result of a query. EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM ref_table,other_table WHERE ref_table.key_column=other_table.column; Source: The fastest query… Is the one you don’t send Don’t select what you don’t need Use LIMIT Use indexes