Pages no longer need to refresh in their entirety to reflect user ineractions.  Ajax – asynchronous javascript -  can make this happen quickly and in front of your eyes.

Study the jQuery web site – this is an library of javascript routines that make javascript coding that little bit easier to learn.

jQuery supplies a series of easy to use APIs – one weekend of study should see you on your way to enlivening your site.

w3schools covers topics like HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP and SQL, but you’ll find a lot more there.

This site is a great starting point for learning to build web sites from scratch. W3Schools had over 11 million unique visitors in January this year. That is staggering.

The web site is completely free, and the site owners expect you to help them out by linking to their site from your blog, pointing out any errors you find on the site and so on. Help to keep this valuable resource free. Use it and link to it.

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!