Sites to use for reference:
- Html5 Boilerplate – I can’t say enough good things about this. Its meant as a starting point for html5 websites, but for me, it works best as a collection of best practices, with excellent external links discussing the use of different techniques, etc… I can easily spend whole days just clicking around here and learning new things. I don’t always use this for new web projects, and when I do, I remove a whole lot of stuff I don’t use.
- Stack Overflow – the best programming Q&A site (includes css/html too) there is.
- Mozilla Deleloper Network (MDN) – I don’t generally go here directly, but prepend my google search queries with mdn when looking up html/css/javascript documentation. Much better than W3Schools.
- Web Developer’s Handbook – I just discovered this large list of web development resources. It looks like it may be a couple years old, but still some good stuff there
Free Online books:
- Html Clinic – The Zen of Web – A really good short intro to html and web site development.
- Dive Into Html5 – Beautiful and informative free online book about Html5 for web developers (not really for beginners)
- Eloquent JavaScript – Excellent book (free online) “providing an introduction to the JavaScript programming language and programming in general.” The online (html) version has some really cool interactivity, but in general this is a good book for the fact that it is well written and respected in the JS community.
- Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners, Volume 1. – (Addy Osmani) – an excellent free Open-sourced short book
Short(ish) tutorials, articles, and other interesting stuff:
Useful Tools:
- [bookmarklet] Fount – This is a handy bookmarklet which identifys fonts on the web. Its handy.
- [bookmarklet] jQuerify – Another useful bookmarklet which loads jQuery onto any page, or, if its already loaded, tells you the version.
- [bookmarklet] Colour Bookmark – This bookmarklet displays all the colors found in a websites stylesheet.