There are a ton of free cheat sheets, quick references, and downloadable resources for programming languages and related technologies on-line.

The following post about Essential HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and miscellaneous cheat sheets kind of gathers a lot of the best resources all in one place.

Enjoy!

While I was putting together some code in order to grab today’s comic from various websites I experimented with several different functions to find the most efficient solution. In the end I ended up using file_get_contents which reads the entire remote file into a string and returns false if file doesn’t exist.

As a developer, time is your most valuable resource. These six tips on how to write more comprehensible and maintainable code are guaranteed to save you time and frustration: one minute spent writing comments can save you an hour of anguish.

Read more | Digg story

A couple of months ago I created a simple PHP script to show the “Help Desk” comic on the sidebar. This time I’ve rewritten the code in order to show more comics (only today’s) and added a caching system that updates the links every 5 hours. Except during the update procedure the add-on should load much faster, and by combining it with my Lightbox Media add-on browsing the comics is sweet and easy.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to distribute the code yet, as there seams to be some copyright issues. On the other hand Netvibes and others are doing it already through their 3rd party modules. Thus, for the time being I’ll just keep it running during an undefined testing period.

That said, I would be happy to get some feedback on this little add-on.

P.S. Just noticed from the stats that Blogvaria passed another milestone. More than 100.000 page views since New Year, and it’s not that long ago when it turned 50.000 hits/views. Furthermore, the average visitor is flipping through approximately 8 pages a visit which means some of you actually find the stuff I write about interesting - thank you!

Came across an article today about Essential JavaScript that focuses on bringing people who already know another programming language up to speed on JavaScript methodology. It covers the basic language constructs and contains multiple examples and references.

Javascript is an interpreted language with a C like syntax. While many people brush the language off as nothing more than a browser scripting language, it actually supports many advanced concepts such as object-oriented-programming, recursion, lambda, and closures. It’s a very approachable language for the beginner that quickly scales to be as powerful a tool as your skills allow.

Not surprisingly the article is written by Patrick Hunlock running Pat’s Place a genuine Tech blog author well known in the Digg community.