2718.us blog » guide http://2718.us/blog Miscellaneous Technological Geekery Tue, 18 May 2010 02:42:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Best Reference Tools Ever http://2718.us/blog/2008/04/17/best-reference-tools-ever/ http://2718.us/blog/2008/04/17/best-reference-tools-ever/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:33:03 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=23 If, like me, you find yourself doing lots of random web stuff, particularly with all the HTML, CSS, MySQL, and PHP that go along with it, you may find yourself looking for a good reference book so you can quickly check the syntax of that one thing you only use like once a year and for which you can never remember the order of the arguments.  For a longtime, for me, this meant that I programmed with a whole separate browser window on a separate monitor devoted just to having up the reference manuals for PHP and MySQL as well as the W3C pages giving the full specs on HTML and CSS, all in whatever versions I happened to be using that day.  It worked, but not well.  (Which is to say, it worked well enough that I haven’t spent the $10-$20 for a nutshell pocket reference guide in a few years, but I’d still look at them every time I was in a bookstore and think about buying them.)

Then I discovered Bob Stein and VisiBone.  For months now, I’ve had the card collection and MySQL cards.  I’ve still had to have the PHP manual up.  That is, until now, with the new PHP products.  With luck, I should have my PHP+MySQL book by the beginning of next week (since he’s updated the MySQL cards since I bought mine, but the card collection is still up to date, so I didn’t get the everything book).  I keep trying to put my VisiBone reference stuff away, since it’s always out in the middle of my desk, but it never stays put away even for a day before I find myself pulling it out to use again.

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