Technology

12 tutorial sites recommended by Pixafy developers

Posted by Pixafy Team

Tutorials

Developers rarely know everything there is to know about programming, as the game is always changing and there are always obscure features that don’t get broken out often. For those times that they need an assist, there are certain sites that have gained a stellar reputation for being helpful to developers.

Here are 12 websites for tutorials and tips for developers that we recommend:

  1. Tuts+: They have a child site for every creative/development field there is like code.tutsplus.com (webdev), wp.tutsplus.com (WordPress) and so on. They offer tons of free tutorials/courses on modern web trends and core development practices. For $20 a month, you can access premium tutorials and courses. Most of the teachers are top notch developers in their field.
  2. Stack Overflow is one of the first places to go when unsure about something. It has a great Q&A format so if you can’t find your answer, you can ask your own. They, too, have sub-sections for popular topics; a Magento area is currently in beta.
  3. When having CSS trouble, head over to CSS Tricks, where you can find a lot of really useful blog posts.
  4. Browse the documentation sites for tech like PHP or jQuery regularly for tips/tricks/hints. The documentation is great and the comments are even better – people have all sorts of solutions to problems that it’s almost impossible to not find what you’re looking for on the first go. Aside from that, be sure to follow a bunch of developers on Twitter and Coderwall to find out the latest. (Look for an upcoming blog post for Twitter accounts we recommend you follow!)
  5. Codrops is very useful, offering inspiration for projects as well.
  6. When dealing a lot with WordPress, WP Beginner is great and can get you going.
  7. A good portion of WordPress support can also be found on their forums. Odds are, since WordPress is so popular and has been around for some time, a problem we’re facing, someone else has probably faced before.
  8. Smashing Magazine has lots of freebies, articles and tutorials.
  9. The tutorial section of .net magazine has some pretty cool offerings as well.
  10. For forward-looking browser features, Can I Use? is pretty sweet – a visual chart of what browsers support a certain HTML 5 tag or CSS feature accompanies the page for each feature.
  11. Although the nature of web safe fonts are changing, most sites use at least one standard font still (Arial, Georgia, etc.).  As such, a good font-family fallback scenario is smart… CSS Font Stack does it well. It also tells you what percentage of Macs and PCs support each individual font (which helps to understand why the fallback stack is so long on some of them).
  12. And of course, you can always check things out here at Pixafy’s thinkbuildblog for many tips and tricks for developers, from developers!

What tutorial sites do you turn to?  Let us know in the comments!