Here's a chance for all to start cheating!

Tony Austin
Monday, 27 October 2008 09:02

Opinion and Analysis

Psssst, keep this to yourself, buddy. Let me tell you about a bunch of free cheat sheets for technology professionals.

Here, I'm using the term "cheat sheet" not in the cheating-in-school-examinations sense but, as Wikipedia puts it, any short (one or two page) reference to terms, commands, or symbols where the user is expected to understand the use of such terms etc but not necessarily to have memorized all of them.

An alternative common designation for these would be "reference cards" or "shortcut guides" or similar.

On the following pages I've focused on some cheat sheets that seem to be very handy mainly for for IT professionals (such as developers, administrators, application architects, website designers).

I said "seem to be" because I can't claim to have more than just a few of them, nevertheless they all appear to have high quality technical content.

I've also put a couple of links to useful web resource pages that I've built up since year 2000 on my own website here (and mirror site here). You should also visit the programming page and the design/usability/accessibility page on my site for some  extremely comprehensive lists of resources of a similar nature.

I'm not at all sure if any, or at least many, iTWire readers are interested in such resources. Maybe my effort in assembling this article is wasted, please let me know. Also, if you have any favorite cheat sheets that I've overlooked, be sure to let us all know about them. Use the iTWire discussion pages, and don't forget to give URLs.

First cab off the rank is Refcardz from DZone, a free link-sharing community for developers where everyone can browse, search and comment on links (free registration is required).

There are free Refcardz for quite a span of technologies. They come as PDF documents. Here's the current list:

• - Core CSS (two parts)
• - PHP
• - Core Java
• - Getting Started with JPA (Java Persistence API)
• - JSF (JavaServer Faces)
• - Dependency Injection in EJB 3
• - Spring Configuration
• - Spring Annotations
• - Struts2
• - GlassFish Application Server
• - Groovy
• - GWT Style, Configuration and JSNI Reference (Google Web Toolkit)
• - Getting Started with Ajax
• - Getting Started with Eclipse
• - NetBeans IDE 6.1 Java Editor
• - IntelliJ IDEA
• - jQuery Selectors
• - Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2
• - Very First Steps in Flex
• - Windows PowerShell
• - Core .NET
• - C#
• - Silverlight 2
• - RSS and Atom
• - Design Patterns

There are lots more interesting links at DZone (apart from the Refcardz), go take a look.

What other cheat sheets are there?

PLEASE READ ON...