Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language?

Posted by samzenpus on from the spread-the-word dept.

Howling writes "I've been a PHP programmer for a few years and after taking a trip through many sites Ive learned that www.php.net is probably the most complete source when looking for information/documentation. I have been trying to find similar sites for every other language (Java, perl or ASP, for instance) without equal success, though. I ask: what is the best documentation/reference site for your preferred programming language?"

4 of 538 comments (clear)

  1. PHP.net is great. by nog_lorp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    PHP has probably the best documentation of an language thanks to PHP.net. It is really wonderful, everyone should follow their lead.

    1. Re:PHP.net is great. by Maian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't know. I've recently had to use PHP for something, and I've been struggling to find out the performance of each function. For example, the php.net articles on count()/sizeof() functions on an array tell me nothing of whether it's O(1) or O(n). PHP really strikes me as a programming language for non-CS majors.

  2. Re:Cookbook site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, this is a troll. But I think it's a necessary one.

    It's a pathetic one. You've made no outrageous link from "this sorta piece" to "deserves to get offshored". You just stuck them in the same sentence. You should have written something to draw people along to agreeing or violently disagreeing with your assertion. You've given people nothing to bite on. It's a hook with no bait. Pathetic.

  3. Re:C: K&R. by raddan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    K&R style, maybe. But it's still useful to have your code wrap to some consistent length-- there's nothing worse than reading someone else's shitty 200-column-wide code in a terminal. There are LOTS of terminals still in use. Not to mention (I don't remember where I heard this-- Oualline's book?), if you can't fit a function call in 80 columns, you might want to rethink about what you're doing. There's probably a better, simpler way.

    But style aside, the content of the book is classic, especially when you start getting into systems programming. These guys had the logical structure of a good computer system worked out a long time ago! Considering that the UNIX C API was basically the first draft of POSIX, reading this book is a must if you ever want to play with the low-level (aka, fun) parts of your operating system. This book almost never leaves my desk, even though I do most of my work in Perl and PHP nowadays.

    I love C because it is a sparse programming language that is very expressive, mainly due to pointers. That has a big influence on my code in other languages, for better or worse. But I find C to be very readable, and I try to do the same for other programs. A lot of "modern" languages just look like barf to me, but I'm probably biased.