CategoryProgramming

August 25, 2014 — Scrolling effects have been around in web design for years now, and while many plugins are available to choose from, only a few have the simplicity and light weight that most developers and designers are looking for. Most plugins I’ve seen try to do too many things, which makes it difficult for designers and developers to integrate them in their projects. Read more…

August 19, 2014 — Since first hearing of spaced repetition a few years back, I’ve used it for a wide range of things, from learning people’s names to memorizing poetry to increasing my retention of books. Today, I’ll share best practices that I’ve discovered from using spaced repetition to learn and master a programming language. Some great articles on this topic are already out there, including “Memorizing a Programming Language Using Spaced Repetition Software” by Derek Sivers and “Janki Method” by Jack Kinsella. But because you’re busy, I’ll quickly summarize some of the best practices that I’ve learned along the way. Read more…

July 30, 2014 — Like most web developers, I spend my days giving instructions to computers. These instructions generally involve some input (a request for a web page), some logic (get the right content from a database) and some output (send the content to the requesting browser). This process of telling a computer how to perform a task, such as generating a web page, is what we commonly call “programming,” but it’s only a subset of programming: imperative programming. Read more…

October 9, 2012 — At some point or another, you will find yourself writing JavaScript code that exceeds the couple of lines from a jQuery plugin. Your code will do a whole lot of things; it will (ideally) be used by many people who will approach your code differently. They have different needs, knowledge and expectations. Read more…

August 17, 2012 — Whenever people ask me about the most powerful things in JavaScript and the DOM, I quickly arrive at events. The reason is that events in browsers are incredibly useful. Read more…

March 24, 2009 — Here, on the Smashing Editorial team, we always try to meet the expectations of our readers. We do our best to avoid misunderstandings, and we try to spread knowedge and present only the best design practices and development techniques. However, sometimes we do make mistakes. And when we do, we apologize and do our best to correct what we’ve done. In November 2008 we published the article 10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming. Apparently, according to negative comments to the post, it contained some errors and some statements that are just wrong. We sincerely apologize for our mistake, and we are truly sorry for any inconvenience we caused by it. However, this simple apology is not good enough. To solve the problem, we asked Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates, two PHP gurus, to take a closer look at the article, explain its errors and make it perfectly clear what is actually right and wrong in the theory and practice. This article is a professional response to our article published a couple of months ago. Read more…

May 2, 2008 — Once your latest project is finished, you are very likely to forget the structure of the project’s layout, with all its numerous classes, color schemes and type setting. To understand your code years after you’ve written it you need to make use of sensible code structuring. The latter can dramatically reduce complexity, improve code management and consequently simplify maintainability. However, how can you achieve sensible structuring? Well, there are a number of options. For instance, you can make use of comments — after all, there is always some area for useful hints, notes and, well, comments you can use afterwards, after the project has been deployed. Read more…