programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I'm a huge fan of Beagle Brothers style cheat sheets, because nothing promotes the illusion of mastery like a densely packed chart of obscure reference information:
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Just throw some of those babies up on your walls and people will know that they're clearly dealing with a coding genius!
VisiBone makes great modern equivalents of these classic references, and they're available in dense card, dense foldout, large print book, and huge wall chart formats. The Visibone regular expression reference is the best concise regex reference I've found to date -- and there's a free online version, too. It is limited to the JavaScript regex syntax, but that's 98 percent of what most people will need.
I've seen the CSS Cheat Sheet before, but I didn't realize there's an entire set of cheatsheets freely available from the same site:
These are all conveniently provided in PDF or PNG formats. If you're a Microsoft .NET programmer, there's no shortage of cheatsheets for you as well:
If you don't see the one you want, here are few other sites that aggregate cheatsheets. Many of them are open-source / UNIX oriented, but they run the gamut.
Know of any other good cheatsheets not listed here? Share in the comments!
Those old Apple cheat sheets sure bring back some good memories! I used to program in opcodes on the old 6502. Good times... Good times...
matt on January 4, 2006 6:40 AMNow if only I had room to put these up somewhere close enough that I can look at them without craning my neck.
Haacked on January 4, 2006 7:40 AMThere is an art to creating a good cheat sheet, which becomes apparent when you try to make one yourself. It's a great exercise in organizing information, designing layout, making typographic choices, etc. Fun for the whole family!
mike on January 4, 2006 11:54 AMI found the hardcopy for-pay reference cards at a href="http://visibone.com"http://visibone.com/a to be well worth the money for me!
Some parts of them are online for free.
Brad Clements on January 5, 2006 3:08 AMThere is an art to creating a good cheat sheet,
Plus, the people who are best at creating the cheat sheets probably are so expert that they don't need them. And if you're too expert, you lack perspective on filtering out just the content that the occasional users need.
Now if only I had room to put these up somewhere close enough that I can look at them without craning my neck.
That's the funny/ironic thing, the actual wall charts are rarely useful because you can't look at them while you're working on the computer.
I find the laminated, large page-ish size ones much more useful-- I keep my Visibones in a stack near my desk and I grab 'em as necessary.
So my recommendation is to print them out (or buy them) and keep them in a stack somewhere within arm's reach.
Jeff Atwood on January 5, 2006 7:22 AMI've printed out most of the ILoveJackDaniels cheat sheets, which are useful, although seem to be geared towards the info *he* needs at hand. Eg, a large portion of the JavaScript one deals with XMLHTTPRequest. If I was doing more Ajax that would be useful, but personally I could use more function reference.
The Visibone JavaScript cards are EXCELLENT due to the useful and concise examples of each item. Some of their one-liners are almost beaglesque! And their color carts are absolutely beautiful.
My solution for maximizing insufficient wallspace is to put a pair of cheatsheets back to back in a plastic page protector sleeve, then hang several of these from a hook on my cube wall. These are fabric-covered walls and a disfigured paperclip makes a fine hook. I either flip through the sleeves on the hook for a quick lookup, or take a few off for more in-depth study.
I like having hanging references since horizontal ones tend to get covered up. Desktops are an overloaded medium.
although seem to be geared towards the info *he* needs at hand
True, they are geared towards that to a degree. The first few were based on notes on my desk (e.g. the PHP date format strings, which I'm always looking up).
There is a second JavaScript one on the way. I'm going to turn the current JavaScript one into an AJAX one, and do a more JS-specific one as well.
ILoveJackDaniels on January 9, 2006 6:23 AMWho needs cheat sheets when there is google :)
Jus kidding.. Yes need to buy one or two of them as they can be handy.
Web Development Company on February 28, 2007 4:43 AMColleague sent me the C#/VS.net shortcuts one. Printed it out and put it on my desk :)
Now, time to print the codesnippets one too!
Carra on January 12, 2008 10:35 AMThe creators of the good cheat sheets are probably expert enough to not need them, but it works in the other direction too---assembling a cheat sheet does wonders for making you more of an expert. Some of my teachers/professors (the cool ones) would let you bring a "cheat sheet" to the tests, usually with the stipulations that 1) it was [small size of paper], 2) handwritten, 3) prepared by yourself. Writing up a good cheat sheet, one that was well organized, reasonably complete, and terse went a long way to eliminating the need for itself.
Somewhere I have a credit-card sized periodic table, complete with ionization states. That thing was a treasure.
Matthew L. on March 3, 2008 11:13 AMOh my God, Awesome resource. I'm going to get a binder and some page protectors and print all those out.
Joseph McCullough on March 10, 2010 8:57 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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