Talk In Code

Koders is a search engine that searches through millions of lines of open source code in lots of different languages to find what you are looking for. The good thing about this is that you can look at real world examples of code that you are writing yourself.

My one criticism is that Koders is more of an interesting toy than anything useful. Although there are lots of examples in the system, there are almost no descriptions on what they do. However, if you are stuck on how to tackle a problem, or can’t seem to figure out how a class or a function works then Koders might be of help to you. You might even find a class that does what you are trying to do.

W3Schools is one of the best online tutorial sites available, but in addition to that, the site is completely free. When I can’t remember how a particular bit of syntax goes I can be pretty much certain that I will find it on this site. There are thousands of examples, explanations, quizzes and reference charts available and they don’t bog you down in too much detail. The examples on the site tell you exactly what you need to know about the subject so that you can copy the code and get on with the task at hand.

The site covers everything from web design with HTML, XHTML and CSS, client side scripting with JavaScript or VBScript, and even server side scripting with PHP or ASP. So if you are ever stuck on a problem or are trying to learn a language then you can do worse than reading through the examples contained in W3Schools.

When writing PHP I usually use the www.php.net site as this has more detailed information, but it is still an excelent resource for beginners of PHP.

Finally, although it is easy to think that W3Schools is run by the W3C, they completely independent.