Expertaya

Smashing magazine is a weblog dedicated to web-developers and designers. Its great because of its overview of interesting stuff for each month. Their published content is a must read if you want to become a good web developer or a designer that follows web design trends.

General, Links blog, design, development, link, resource, web

Pushing-pixels by Kirill Grouchnikov is a dynamic blog on GUIs with a special attention to swing. It has weekly digest on popular swing links and is good place to start when searching for news in that field.

Java, Links gui, Java, link, swing

Launchy is a handy tool that can help you when you have messy folders and want to quickly find and open application, document or play the mp3 song. With it you can forgot about desktop, quicklaunch or start menu for starting applications. Iit’s free and makes your desktop life a lot easier. Try it!

General desktop, keyboard, tip

http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/ – A really good advanced javascript tutorial.
If you want to be able to understand the code below, than this tutorial is the right thing.

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// The .bind method from Prototype.js
Function.prototype.bind = function(){
  var fn = this, 
  args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments),
  object = args.shift();
  return function(){
    return fn.apply(object,
      args.concat(Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments)));
  };
};

Javascript, Links advanced, Javascript, tutorial

If you are an active member of some programming community you won’t probably need any of existing freelancing sites since your friends usually have enough jobs to pass to you…

But in case you still want a recommendation for a freelance site then here it is: Elance.

You can however find more jobs on others but at rates that are usually significantly lower than on Elance.

Happy freelancing.

General, Links community, freelance, recommendation

If you are a programmer you probably do follow at least a single newsletter. What is your recommendation?

Considering job I have been doing for the past few years I found that I am totally satisfied by receiving emails from InfoQ.

Please comment if you have any other to recommend. The post will be updated with your recommendations but it won’t contain more than 3 different newsletters.

General, Links infoq, newsletter, recommendation

Ok, lets recommend resources in following categories: ebooks, blogs, forums.

Ebooks:

The JavaSeries is supported, endorsed, and authored by the creators of the Java technology at Sun Microsystems, Inc. It is the official place to go for complete, expert, and definitive information on Java technology. The books in this Series provide the inside information you need to build effective, robust, and portable applications and applets. The Series is an indispensable resource for anyone targeting the Java 2 platform.

Actually this quote is 100% true.

Blogs:

The recommendation goes to Artima.

Artima Developer is an online community where developers learn from experts in the software industry as well as interact, share information, and learn from each other.

Forum:

Javaranch – In two words – great forum. There are lot of interesting discussions at all levels (from beginner to expert). Nearly 200,000 members. Book writers are frequent forum visitors.

Java, Links blog, ebook, forum, Java

When you’re stuck with a programming, installation, or other similar problem your closest friend is usually Google. But, as many of you already know, having a friend that is expert in an area can in many cases lead to solving your problem lot quicker than “googling” for an answer. Friend can usually point you to the right track or give you the straight answer immediately. Now, imagine that you have thousands of friends Read more…

General community, help, irc

Eclipse is a well-known, widely used, etc. IDE.

In this post you can find some tips for programmers on how to use it effectively. Effectiveness is usually boosted with keyboard shortcuts and here are the most useful ones: Read more…

Java eclipse, effective, expert, keyboard, shortcuts, tips

One may think that if he or she wants to work “professionally” with Ajax and Javascript that he will gonna need a comprehensive IDE that enables “fancy” features.

But, in this case, you can do everything well and with great efficiency if you stick to Firebug and its built-in Javascript debugging tools. Of course, you should have a text editor with syntax highlighting at least. (We recommend Notepad++).

The instructions on how to use Firebug for debugging Javascript can be found here.

Javascript ajax, debugging, expert, firebug, Javascript