If you haven’t heard of the DZone Refcardz and you are a developer, consider this your Christmas present. From me to you. DZone has been producing those little cheat sheets for a while now and they have built up a pretty nice collection. Each refcard contains a condensed overview of a certain piece of technology or paradigm. In most cases, they can serve both as starting point if you want to learn or as a reference if you already know your stuff.
Here are 5 I reference a lot. They’re mostly Java centric, but there are a bunch of .Net or Flash/Flex cards available, so check out the full collection if you’re interested.
- NetBeans Java Editor 6.8. I use Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA on a regular basis. They all have their strong points and their weaknesses. NetBeans is very strong in it’s GUI department. They have graphical editor for nearly every Java technology you can think of. And if you’re doing J2ME work, I can’t recommend NetBeans strongly enough.
- Google App Engine for Java. I have only recently begun experimenting with Google App Engine so you might see a more detailed blogpost on it in the future. Suffice to say, although it has limitations, the App Engine is great and, most of all, cheap way to deploy Java applications.
- Getting Started with BlazeDS. I’ve been meaning to get into some serious Flex and BlazeDS development for a while now. This refcard will make it easy to get back into the groove when I find the time.
- Getting Started with Selenium. Selenium is a great technology for web application integration testing. It can automate many of the tests that usually have to be performed by hand. Selenium will click buttons, fill forms and check results. All in an automated and reproducible manner.
- Apache Tapestry 5.0. I haven’t worked with Tapestry 5 just yet, but the Devoxx presentation has me convinced this is something I need to follow.
What are your favorite refcardz?