Programming Ecosystems

When you're doing something as actively changing and dynamic as web development and design, you cannot rely on books and tutorials. Tutorials in particular are sometimes just plain bad, and when you're starting, you can't tell the difference. Books are nice, but only can give you a start - after that, the topics are too broad to put into books for the most part, and when they do, they're too specialized (unless you really do have a strong interest in one subset, such as screen scraping or data mining, and even then, there's dozens of books out there).

The important part they're missing is that of tapping into a sort of ecosystem of that language or field. There's more to web development and design than just learning your basic HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a server-side language of choice, and having a go at it. There's a thriving community that constantly is publishing innovative new techniques, news, and invaluable little tidbits of information that are essential to doing what you do properly.

It's not just bug reports and release announcements that I'm talking about. I'm talking about things like innovative methods of protecting posted email address from spam. This isn't the most exciting of examples, perhaps, but it's a valid issue, and worth reading up on, because it comes up all the time. You wouldn't see that sort of thing in a book or tutorial, you have to keep an eye on your blogs and other "ecosystem" sources such as periodicals.

Blogs are nice, but they're just not always exactly the cream of the informative crop. Sometimes you need something in between the in depth detail of a well-written book and the immediacy and breadth of topics of a blog. Filling this gap are magazines and other periodicals, and in this field, many are published online. Comparing them to blogs is a little like comparing student essays to academic journals, although perhaps to a slightly lesser degree. Good ones have articles written by highly qualified and talented individuals in their fields and areas of interest, and will still have a decently wide array of topics, while still staying in the specific area of interest to their readership.

I can sit and talk about this for pages and pages, but instead, let me just give examples, and you can go agree or disagree with me for yourself. Below are some of the blogs and periodicals that I keep up on (I can't read 100% of all of these, but more or less), and hence are mostly in the area of web development and design. I'm not going to list the same things that are in the area of Linux, because that can fill a whole other blog entry, and the reasons are really the same, only possibly even more important because of the higher level of development and cohesion in the Linux community.

I'm also not listing every last one, because for one thing, I don't know them all. I only have a little free time to keep up on the ones that I happen to know about now. Secondly, because part of the process is just finding out what's out there and finding ones specific to what you find interesting, and that match your level of knowledge. I haven't found many that are terribly advanced and you need a huge amount of background knowledge for, but there are ones out there geared more to the entry-level potential developer (much as Tux Magazine was geared to the new Linux user).

So, for web design (i.e. not generally programming, but the client-side of things, and the artistic element of making a web interface):

• A List Apart - Excellent articles, and they have extra points with me because not only do they preach it, they practice it. Their site is simply a pleasure to look at, visually, and even have a look at the HTML source - clean CSS layout, and very good and semantic all around.
  
• Refresh Detroit - I can't say I know much about these folks, but I've been sort of keeping an eye on them a little, and I'll admit partly just because they're local to me. I've written before on the area of the importance of web standards, and they say that's a prime element of their purpose, so they're worth watching.
  
• Particle Tree - I actually only found them today while looking up an old online periodical that they did called Treehouse Magazine. I've only seen the first issue (because they gave it away for free, and I'm cheap) so far, and years ago when it first came out, but I remember being impressed. I'll probably consider ordering their back issues, and watch their blog from now on. I'd encourage others to do so as well.

More on the programming side, as I said, I'm biased towards Perl still, and still getting into the PHP side, but here's the ones that have come up for me anyway. Even if you don't use Perl much, maybe it'll help give an idea and examples of what's out there:

• Perl Monks - A great (if not slightly ugly) Perl community site, and a must-have for anyone that uses Perl often. Ask the Perl Monks a question, give an example of clever code you wrote, or even read and submit poetry entirely written in valid, runnable Perl. The "Cool Uses For Perl" section is always fun to read. It's great to see what some skilled people can do with Perl that you might never think of even trying. If you do Perl, you need to be frequenting this site. Daily.
  
• Perl.com - Run by O'Reilly, who also publish some awesome books on every conceivable technical topic, this site has a pretty decent flow of articles on Perl programming related topics and general Perl news.
  
• MySQLForge - I cheat here a little, this is (obviously) for the MySQL database, but with web development, you rarely get away without some kind of database, so I'll toss it in here, too. Code snippets and projects galore. It's a fun thing to browse through.

So there's a start for you. Go forth and find more, and by all means, post your own that I didn't cover in the comments.