Help and Tutorials

• Coding Standard
  This document contains suggested best practices and style guidelines for Java, HTML and JavaScript development. I started writing this coding standard in February 2002. This document is actually a very much expanded and edited version of a similar document I co-authored with Roneel Achal in late 2000. The purpose of this document is to provide some guidance for juniour developers regarding minimum expected coding practises.
• Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
  An absolutely wonderfull reference for both novice and expert web developers. This online book (which is also available in hard copy from Chapters-Indigo or Barns & Noble ) was written by Philip Greenspun.
• A very simple (and somewhat out of date) Unix FAQ/tutorial
  When I was a systems administrator, I wrote this material in a desperate attempt to fend off the large volume of user help calls I was fielding. I attempted to explain some very basic Unix usage concepts. I found myself explaining these things to every new user/employee and decided it would be much more efficient to create help documentation containing explanations of frequently misunderstood topics. Sometime after the document went live, a co-worker decided to edit the pages and improve them. If I am motivated I will correct/remove his inclusions - but don't hold your breath.
• the Story of Mel
  This isn't a tutorial or help guide but it is an interesting read dealing with the way things were in the olden days

Useful links

• the Apache Software Foundation - home of the world's most robust and feature rich httpd and home to other software projects (such as Tomcat, Ant, Jakarta and gobs of other stuff)
• CPAN - the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
• DNSstuff.com - a bunch of whois type name and IP resolution tools ... very handy
• GNU - high quality Open Source software and a recursive name - what's not to love
• NetBSD.org - home of a highly portable (ie. runs on just about any platform) Unix like OS ... also the home of the NetBSD packages collection which is a framework for building third part software on NetBSD and other *nix systems
• Network Tools - ping, traceroute and a bunch of other handy troubleshooting tools
• Internet Engineering Task Force - the nice people who maintain the and make available RFC documents (amongst other things)
• Source Forge - the world's largest Open Source software development website ... a great place for downloads and information on a plethora of Open Source projects
• Sunfreeware.com
  This site contains many pre-compiled binary packages for popular utilities. I found this very useful recently when compiling gcc on a Solaris 2.6 node for which there was no functional C complier installed (/usr/ccs/cc had not been properly installed). I merely grabbed the package for gcc 2.95.3, installed it using pkgadd(1) and then compiled gcc from source.

Humour

• Why you shouldn't page a sys admin after hours...