Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

Safari Books Online offers access to over 3,000 technical books, videos and tutorials from O’Reilly, Peachpit, Cisco Press, Sams, Que, and Adobe Press. Normally this service costs $22.95 per month, but you can use this great resource though the Contra Costa Library for free! All you need is a library card. If you don’t have a library card you can [...]

SitePoint.com is offering a series of courses on JavaScript, CSS, and PHP. The courses are two to three weeks in duration and use video tutorials, written tutorials, chat, and message forums to deliver the content. The JavaScript Live class just ended, but you can still take the course for $9.95 at your own pace. David H. completed the JavaScript course [...]

With hundreds of tutorials for creating portfolio layouts and mockups in Photoshop it’s hard to find tutorials that are easy for novice Photoshop users to understand and complete. We have reviewed several tutorials for creating one page portfolio layouts and I feel the following should be easy enough for the beginner to understand. These tutorials will teach you many new [...]

I never really worry about having multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one computer, I have a computer lab with 38 machines at work. At home I have an XP box with IE 6, an XP laptop with IE 7, and a Vista laptop with IE8. Unfortunately, my XP box with IE 6 is suffering some hardware issues and I’m [...]

A common question in class is “how do I overlap images and still see the background?” The answer, you use some type of transparent image. Traditionally we used a transparent GIF, but the quality isn’t so great. PNG has really become the preferred image format for transparency. PNG 8 gives you a transparent image, but you may see some white [...]

SitePoint is offering a deal on PDF versions of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design and Sexy Web Design. Both PDF design books can be yours for just $14.95for the next 12 hours. These books are both required reading for the Web Design and Development curriculum, so if you haven’t gotten them yet now is a great time! From SitePoint [...]

Firebug is one of the most popular Firefox extensions for troubleshooting CSS problems. Firebug Lite is a JavaScript file that simulates some of Firebug’s features in Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and other browsers. You can use the Firebug Lite bookmarklet in class. Due to our security settings you won’t be able to drag the bookmarklet to the Favorites/Bookmarks bar as [...]

So you’re working on your first simple HTML and CSS site. You’ve got a gorgeous layout in your head and hopefully sketched out on paper and you’re ready to fire up the HTML editor. The first HTML page starts to take shape, the doctype is set and divs for the wrapper, header, sidebar, content, and footer are added to the [...]

As you start to build your own Web sites you will more than likely come across a few CSS browser bugs. You ma y encounter the “float drop bug”, the “3 pixel jog”, or the “IE double margin float bug” to name a few. Before you pull your hair out with frustration, read the articles below which contain many of [...]

Pievincenzo Madeo, aka @piervix, of PV.M Garage has collected a great set of resources for people who want to learn how to create themes for WordPress. In his post, Become A WordPress Theme Developer Who Rocks In Four Steps (and 50+ readings), Pievincenzo outlines his four step process for developing WordPress themes and includes links to tutorials for developing themes [...]