Slashdot Mirror
Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language?
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?"
If it's scheme you're looking for, there's R5RS and the SRFIs; also, don't forget the world's possibly best-written programming book: SICP.
cpan.org and python.org
just google: java X class where X is whatever you want. Top results will be sun java docs which are complete and have links to parent and descendent classes, implemented interfaces, etc.
for asp: asp.net. has very good tutorials. for reference use msdn library.
php: php.net
coldfusion: adobe.com
html, css, javascript, sql: w3schools.com
python: python.org
c/c++: devshed.com
java: java.sun.com
Anything else: my brilliant co-worker.
One of the best tutorials and references for Tcl is the Wikibook on Tcl programming.
Indeed, it's one of the best programming texts I've seen in any language.
Object Pascal reference & C reference.
Amnesty International
Documentation: peldoc.perl.org
Community: perlmonks.org
Articles: www.perl.com (O'Reilly site)
I have found the perl community to be the most open, supportive and cohesive group of all the languages I work with. Right now I am working with PHP, perl and C#, and perl is by far the easiest language to get help and correct information. I can find tons of info on the other languages, but the information isn't always the best quality.
Good luck with your search.
So is Each the next great scripting language? I've never tried it...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
experts-exchange.com
*ducks*
http://cprogramming.com/ - best site for beginners in my opinion.
Perhaps this a question for Stack Overflow?
-fragbait
I don't dislike C#; it's basically just Java, so if you like one, you'll probably like the other.
The documentation on the other hand...Just go buy a book, because the online docs are slow sadistic torture.
I used to think Java was a bit mean for just throwing out the big API and letting you fend for yourself, but C# throws out part of an API and examples that only cover part of what you need to know. It is extremely frustrating, and the fact that they clearly think it's better than Java's spartan lists of packages, classes, and their properties...That just makes it worse.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
PHP has probably the best documentation of an language thanks to PHP.net. It is really wonderful, everyone should follow their lead.
Aside from the obvious, there are some interesting papers, essential reading, a mailing list, a tutorial, and even a (reasonably complete) wikibook.
For C, use the most holy book:
K&R
(aka "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie, http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/)
-proidiot
... if the complete reference can't be included inline in a /. post. Here's all you need to know:
> increment the pointer (to point to the next cell to the right).
< decrement the pointer (to point to the next cell to the left).
+ increment (increase by one) the byte at the pointer.
- decrement (decrease by one) the byte at the pointer.
. output the value of the byte at the pointer.
, accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the pointer.
[ jump forward to the command after the corresponding ] if the byte at the pointer is zero.
] jump back to the command after the corresponding [ if the byte at the pointer is nonzero.
http://www.gotapi.com/ It's got all the good reference sites in one. You click the reference site, it adds a tab to the gotAPI webpage. It has a really good search box. No signup required. Best all-in-one reference ever.
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.
I noticed a lack of threads talking about good reference sites for VB.Net. Perhaps I should reconsider my language of choice?
SNOBOL - http://www.snobol4.org/
Logo - http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/programming.html
FORTH - http://www.phact.org/e/forth.htm
Prolog - http://www.logic.at/prolog/faq/faq.html
Algol - http://www.algol68.org/
Lucid - http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Lucid
PL/I - http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm
you insensitive clod!!
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
The most annoying thing is having to go on the web to find a doc. PHP is horrifying enough and then you read the docs and find all the exceptions to whatever rule (and the bugs) in the comments.
For Perl:
perldoc -f [function name]
Or perldoc [Module::Name] (also man Module::Name works on most Linux distros)
Also on Linux, 'man perl' gives a list of a whole ton of man pages that give you specific information on regexes, objects, references, syntax, variables, etc.
And if you have to have it in a pretty web interface it is indeed all online
(module docs are as well)
Say what you want about Perl but it has tons of useful modules and it is very well documented.
The Anti-Blog
For the .NET languages, such as XAML, C#, and VB.NET, I'd have to say that for general data on how to use the function, MSDN is a great resource, between their forums and MSDN online library.
Google's also a great resource.
For Common Lisp, the Common Lisp HyperSpec is hard to beat, though at times a book like Practical Common Lisp can be a little more useful.
If you use Eclipse you can configure the javadoc URL in your JDK configuration and pull up the pages from within the IDE. VERY handy.
Kinda obvious (no more obvious than php.net being the best reference for php I suppose), but: http://docs.jquery.com/
C++ FAQ Lite is an excellent site for C++ information.
For Ruby as well as Ruby on Rails, I like http://apidock.com/. It's the first Ruby/Rails doc site that I've seen that has the ability to contribute, rate contributions, etc.
It also covers when methods changed by tags, so you can see that a method that's giving you trouble was changed the last version of rails, etc. Very intuitive interface.
-knewter
http://gotapi.com/
They're always adding new languages, and it only takes up one tab. This is wonderful when I'm bouncing from Python to Perl to Javascript to CSS to HTML to MySQL to...
You get the point.
This site is good for a number of languages, particularly for Java. Just read it and do the opposite.
Lua:
Official website: http://www.lua.org/
Direct link to manual: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/
Lua community: http://lua-users.org/wiki/
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Wikibooks because if it isn't already there, someone will eventually write one and make it open sourced.
I invite Slashdot readers and posters to write their own ebooks at Wikibooks in an open source license.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
have you tried mono?
My language of use for the past 3 years, OpenLaszlo has brilliant doco right there on the site. With a reference guide that lists all the objects, methods and events with live, editable examples for many.
And then if the documentation doesn't cover what you want, there's the great forums which have helped me out of plenty of sticky coding situations.
The doco was what drew us to OpenLaszlo in the first place. Well, that and the fact it's open source helped a lot!
I think you misinterpreted the tongue-in-cheek language.
I don't know the reason why some languages (like C) have little online presence. There is comp.lang.c on usenet and the comp.lang.c FAQ. And a couple of online versions of man pages, but it's hard to learn C from man pages alone. And there is the C89/C99 specs, but I don't think that's a great way to learn C either. If you ignore usenet (most people do), I would venture to say there is basically nothing good about C online.
Compared to the books you can get that cover C programming, ones on algorithms, data structures, C itself, and various APIs. The web seems vastly inferior. I'm not trying to claim I know the reason why, I'm just pointing out that this is currently the case. Currently paper is better than electrons for SOME languages.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Java:
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
I do a little happy dance in my head every time this site helps me out. it's a bit intimidating until you use it, then it becomes the best java reference you could ask for.
Ruby:
use fxri. in windows, it's not just a live command-line style interpreter, it has a dictionary of relevant terms to search through to boot. it's like having a terminal inside of a reference book, and you shouldn't pass up the opportunity to try it out.
php:
http://www.php.net/docs.php
this one I use every time I use php. Not only does it tell you what everything does, but it tells you what's bugged, and how, and that way you can work around what would otherwise be a nasty problem.
I use these constantly at my job (fxri is the only calculator I know of that can calculate the factorial of 6022, so I use it for all my calculations!) and I hope you find them just as useful as I do.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Why? Cause people offshore don't use web resources to learn new languages?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Nobody's got any good links for Assembly programming?? I figured I'd see at least one...
God is real, unless declared integer.
have you tried mono?
I thought I had once, but it turns out I'm just really lazy.
The official site is always a good bet. But I also make it a habit to memorize the url to the rdoc of whatever I'm doing:
ruby-doc.org/core
api.rubyonrails.org
Beyond that, it's more about the framework. For example:
ramaze.net
sequel.rubyforge.org
Beyond that, there's the source (and IRB + tab-completion), and for the really tough questions, the ruby-talk mailing list.
Can't really recommend the jQuery docs, as they're down half the time, the UI is lacking some critical features, and it doesn't seem to quite work in Konqueror. For a library claiming to be cross-browser, you should at least have your docs be cross-browser!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
For VBScript I tend to use google to find specific things. I haven't found one site that really covers enough in one place. Most people will write off VBScript being that it is Microsoft and Windows is evil and all that.
Seeing as I use VBScript mainly for natively being able to pull information from LDAP directories from a Windows XP machine I must at least defend it.
MS Scripting Guy, DevGuru, 4GuysFromRolla, and last but not least ActiveXperts.
It depends if I want info on WMI, LDAP, or general WSH Objects.
For VB or MSVC++ its MSDN.
The main source of information just is.
*Ducks*
Cheers, Chris
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library
For .Net stuff (similar to php.net)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/w0x726c2.aspx
Check the class library (or search)
Particularly the .Net Framework Library
The other option is to install the Visual Studio library press F1 on an intelisense item ie
System.Web.UI.TextBox and the object pops up in a help window (like back in the good old days of Borland C/Pascal).
ASP Specific (AJAX etc) check the "How do I"
www.asp.net (the learn tab has vids)
Silverlight
www.silverlight.net (vids under learn)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/bb404700(VS.95).aspx
Specifically search.cpan.org.
Sometimes I browse around to see what I might come up with for new modules. The documentation is awesome because not only is it formatted, but you also can link directly to a specific version, see the installation test report for various OSes for that version, see submitted bugs, other comments and module dependencies.
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Malbolge_programming
or perhaps
http://www.samaritans.org.uk/
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
http://www.regular-expressions.info/
I'll just leave this here.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Hi there all you programming langauges. I've called you all here because we need to talk. There's some things I need to get off my chest.
SNOBOL
If the world revolved around writing backgammon games, baby, you'd be the end all be all. But you're bloody useless at anything else. You're pretty but uselss.
Logo
You wear me out. I have to tell you to do everything.
FORTH
DARLING I MISS YOU. Where are you?
Prolog
You look good on paper, but you scare me. Remember that time in Beverly Hills? You have some very odd friends. And what's with the pink ties?
Algol
Oh algol. We had some great times together. But there is life after college, really.
Lucid
Lucid: you aren't. You should have been called "heroin".
PL/I - http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm
PL/I you are the perfect ex langauge. There's nothing to like about you and I don't miss you. Hell I don't even remember you that well any more. You're so damn difficult even your name cant be used in a URL because you screw that up. Put skip THIS, bitch.
Forth come back! All is forgiven. Let's just you and me go someplace and dup dup dup. Or was that postscript. No no, she's just a friend.
Aww dammit. Forth? Honey?
Need Mercedes parts ?
I generally like http://abap.wikiprog.com/ for ABAP most, though SAP's own SDN works fine most of the time.
Life is great! (as told by Lady Susan)
Almost 300 replies and no mention of Objective-C ?
developer.apple.com - Apple documentation, good reference but sometimes lacking in details
cocoadev.com - Cocoa wiki
cocoabuilder.com - Cocoa mailing list archives
C
The GNU C Library
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/
C++
Standard Template Library Programmer's Guide
http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/
Boost C++ Libraries
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs
Java
Java(TM) Platform, Standard Edition 6 API Specification
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
Perl
Perl version 5.10.0 documentation
http://perldoc.perl.org/
Python
Python Library Reference
http://docs.python.org/lib/lib.html
For learning C and C++, I recommend these books:
Kernighan, Ritchie: The C Programming language
Kernighan, Pike: The Practice Of Programming
Koenig, Moo: Accelerated C++: Practical Programming by Example
Sutter, Alexandrescu: C++ Coding Standards
Mysql has manuals online, as does postgresql and Oracle.
http://diveintopython.org/
a neat and tidy guide, after which u'll end up loving snakes..
na hawedere!
may the alps be with u's
Oracle: asktom.oracle.com for technique/problem solving with SQL.
technet.oracle.com or tahiti.oracle.com for documentation.
Peter Paul Koch's excellent quirksmode.org
She made the willows dance
Next question - where is the best location to maintain the compiled results? In the meantime, I'm bookmarking this discussion.