Funcoder Technology Blog – WinDev Consultant

I find that life as a developer involves continuous learning of new techniques and technologies. To help me achieve this I thought it would be helpful for you folks to know the sites I use.

1. Sitepoint

I love the Sitepoint books, they are so clear and easy to understand and they get the aesthetics just right. I am always getting emails from them with great discounts on new books and being able to download the PDF version while I wait for the physical book to arrive is great.

Visit Sitepoint Here

2. Pragmatic Programmers

I was looking recently on my account and realised that I have purchased 28 books from this site. The range of content is fantastic, from Pragmatic Thinking when developing to learning Cocoa and iPhone development. The new feature of being able to download a purchased book and read it on my iPhone is very cool.

Visit Pragmatic Programmers Here

3. Peepcode

I admit it, I have a thing for Ruby on Rails and this is why I love the video training from Peepcode. It also has a few videos from Lars Pind, who is a great Life Coach and developer. I would highly recommend Productivity for Programmers.

4. Safari Books Online

There are so many books out there and sometimes you just need a section from a book to understand a concept. This is the great part of Safari Books Online and its search facilities. I wouldn’t use this to read a who book as I’m the type of person that wants to hold it in my hands and turn pages.

Visit Safari Books Online Here

5. Lynda.com

This site has a wealth of video training for us techies, ranging from HTML, CSS, JavaScript to how to use development tools like Dreamweaver.

Visit Lynda.com Here

This is a look to ways we will be interacting with computers in the future, using spatial movements as demonstrated in the film The Minority Report.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Just been listening to an interesting webcast from NASA where people submitted questions to one of the STS-117 Astronaut’s.

One question was about what they use to relax and listen on during missions. They can’t use a standard iPOD as there is no way to charge the device on the shuttle. NASA have created a mod to the iPOD so that the Astronauts can use standard batteries to power it.

Cool!

I am a big fan of Blackberry and use a 7100i to push my email and some blogs via RMail.

The new Blackberry Curve has some great new features including instant messaging built in.

I would still like to see RSS push built into the service, the same way as email. RMail is good but it will only push the rss every few hours and it would be useful to me to have an immediate push.

Unlike my 7100, it has a camera and mp3 and video player out of the box.

This is definitely a contender to replace my current Blackberry.

Tumblr is an interesting new blogging website. I often want to add bits of information I read about, but my mail blog really isn’t the place for these types of messages.

You can now view my tumblelog at http://funcoder.tumblr.com