Handy Cheat Sheets for Web Developers, Everywhere
Today I’d like to introduce you to the concept company that is Visibone. Run by a charming eloquent chap called Bob Stein, they produce a range of physical, real-world information packed cheat sheets for web designers and developers.
I wish they had an affiliate program as I would promote their products happily. I recently bought the product they call the Browser Book.
The Browser Book costs $50, (I didn’t buy the laminated version which is a bit extra), and it contains a wealth of information.
I am in the UK, and Visibone are located in the US. I ordered the Browser Book on the 8th July and it arrived today – the 16th July.
Anyway – here is a run-down of what the browser book contains:
Web Safe Colours
Colour Card with hex and RGB values for all web safe colours. The image above shows the colour chart with all 216, web safe colours. When you are stuck for a colour scheme this can be a good starting point. Web Safe colours have never looked so appealing.
Fonts
All standard fonts on Windows, Macs and Linux, with examples of how they look and an indication of font sizes
Symbols
Codes for HTML symbols with hex values too. This makes it a simple lookup to figure out how to do characters like these : ♥ and ½ and ∇
XHTML
A full list of XHTML tags with popular attributes – never for example have to scratch you head for all the attributes available on a form tag again. And did you know there is a tag for quote marks
. I didn’t.
CSS
Just what I need – a list of stylesheet reminders, (CSS2). This is great as I love to code CSS by hand and now I can just look something up if I’ve forgotten. I can code in Notepad if that is what I want, (rather than have to bring out the predictive HTML editor . . .). There is also a useful HTML ⇒ XHTML migration checklist.
Javascript
Visibone uses Javascript asserts to explain the Javascript syntax. As Bob says “all the code here not only runs, but tests itself”. Somehow manages to introduce you to Javascript functions you don’t know, by using them to explain the ones you wished you knew. Clever.
The DOM
The Javascript Document Object Model. Really very useful when you are manipulating page content. Which in itself can make you drive you insane, so this helps.
Regular Expressions
Javascript Regular Expressions with lots of usable code, right there on the page. I bought a book once, called Regular Expressions for Dummies
. So this is definitely a step up.
MySQL
Next is a MySQL statement summary – very useful for jogging you memory for date functions, and the order of tokens to use when you are wanting to GROUP BY, LIMIT TO and ORDER BY whilst HAVING a headache.
PHP
There is also help with PHP 4 and 5 with a fabulous list of functions including MySQL calls, string functions and even PHP.ini options.
Thanks Bob!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Browsers, CSS, In the office, Javascript, PHP, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
