Whenever I go to Border’s or the library, I always find myself browsing the computer/code section. I’ll flip through books on html, CSS, web design, wondering if there’s something new I can learn. Wondering if I’ll hit upon a magic volume that has all the answers.
But other than a book I’ve been coveting on CSS hacks, there’s really not much I need. I frequently want to double-check things, but the internet is much more helpful than any one book. And a search engine is better than any one site.
Say, for example, I wanted to remember what the name for the CSS property which makes an unordered list appear with hollow circles instead of filled ones. Disc? Dot? Circle? I simply open a tab and run this search http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=css+list+style&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 (as you can see, I was using Opera).
Voila! The first result is from w3schools.com and tells me that if I want a circle marker, I use “list-style-type: circle;”. But if I want a filled circle, I use “disc.”
For more complicated queries, I’ve even run across forums I never knew existed where someone else has already asked the question. The answer probably isn’t in your average reference book (at least not in simple answer form), nor is it somewhere I’d have thought to look.
I could bookmark w3schools.com, in fact I already have. But it’s faster for me to hit Ctrl+T and run a search in my little google search box than it is for me to open a Tab and then find/click on a bookmark, etc. It’s much faster than pulling out a reference book (even if it’s beside me) and flipping to the right page.
If I had a hard time finding a piece of information, or if it’s an extremely valuable resource, I do bookmark it. Generally I use my delicious account (apparently it’s not del.icio.us any more). But my bookmarks are more of a backup than anything else. They just take longer to use.
The nice thing about code, whether it’s xhtml & CSS or PHP or something more complicated, is that what you find on the internet is pretty often reliable. Especially what you find on the top search results. It’s much less subjective and controversial than almost anything else out there. You don’t need to cite your sources as long as your code works. So whether you got it from the w3schools or from a blog (like my entry on using Conditional PHP in Wordpress) you just need it to work.
Buy the reference books if you want to, especially if you’re starting out and want to understand the structure of the code. But don’t discount the power of search engines. They may not be good sources for your research paper on gender-bending in Elizabethan drama, but they’re great sources for your code questions.
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w3schools.com is always my first stop for reference.