A List of Useful Web Development Blogs

The Internet is a noisy place, with Twitter updates constantly
streaming and blogs spewing out second-hand knowledge, making it
difficult to find sources that are both credible and consistently good.
Here are a few blogs that I follow that keep me informed on what’s going on and what’s next in Web technology.

JavaScript

Ajaxian: This is the
blog on the Web for all things JavaScript and AJAX. The blog profiles
new frameworks, libraries, and techniques that you can usually bring
immediately into your Web development. They have a nice mix between
covering the new and shiny stuff, as well as posts that instruct
readers on how to become better JavaScript programmers.

ejohn.org:
John Resig’s blog has long been a source of JavaScript knowledge. The
jQuery creator and Mozilla evangelist shares years of industry know-how
and is a great programmer. He does a nice job of detailing the inner
workings of JavaScript, as well detailing useful tidbits about jQuery.

PHP

Chris Shiflett: PHP security, no thanks to PHP itself, is hard to
get right, as security features that should be enabled are disabled by
default, and vice versa. My favorite example is the mysql_escape_string
versus mysql_real_escape_string. Instead of deprecating the former, you
have both and you have to know which one to use.

suspekt.org:
In a similar vein as Chris Shiflett’s blog, but another great resource.
suspekt keeps an eye on security regressions and improvements at the
PHP source level between version and monitors Suhosin patches, which
harden a stock PHP install. Stefen Esser speaks
often at big PHP conferences and is fantastic about putting his slides
up about the state of the art in PHP security.

Security

ha.ckers.org:
These guys keep up with dark side of the Web and distill that knowledge
for the average web developer. My favorite part of this site is their
XSS-checking tool: http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html.

Google Online Security: Google sees a lot of sites
poorly designed for security and here are their suggestions to help
make the Web safer for everyone.

Software Development

Uncle Bob’s Software Craftsmanship Corner:
Robert Martin (AKA Uncle Bob) is a great resource on how to approach
software design and construction from a reasoned point of view. While
it is easy to write less-than-elegant code, Uncle Bob encourages
you take the high road and write your code for your future self and
comrades. He literally wrote the book on clean code, titled
appropriately “Clean Code,” which is also highly recommended.

Google Testing:
This blog is a fascinating look into the testing culture at Google. I’d
imagine that the extent of their testing puts most software teams to
shame, but it’s nice to see how one of the biggest in Web software does
it.

Michael Feathers: Similar to Uncle Bob (they
actually work at Object Mentor together), Feathers’ blog is another
great programming resource. I see Uncle Bob as more of a nuts-and-bolts
writer, while Michael Feathers takes a more wide-angle glance at
software development. His book “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”
is a good read if you ever find yourself working with older code.

Steve Yegge
(http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants and continued at
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/): While famous for his verbosity,
Steve Yegge always has a interesting story to tell. Every post has its
own roundabout way of making you a better programmer, or at least make
you think about code you write, which is a win in my book.

HTML/CSS:

zeldman.com, meyerweb.com, snook.ca:
These three, Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Jonathan Snook, have long
been considered the vanguards of writing semantic and
standards-compliant HTML, as well as being a valuable resource of how
to design for the Web using CSS.

diveintomark.org: Mark Pilgrim is an extremely funny and
talented writer — his book, Dive Into Python, has been considered the
best way to learn Python for several years. He is involved in WHATWG,
the group that shapes the future of Web technology and the drafters of
HTML5. He maintains doctype
(http://code.google.com/p/doctype/wiki/Welcome) which is a must-read
for web developers.

Grab Bag

stackoverflow.com:
Not a blog per se, but I couldn’t leave it out. An engaging and
knowledgeable community is always available to give advice on every aspect of
technology, to general programming practices to very specific language/API
questions.

YDN Blog: The Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
covers everything from performance to accessibility to their cool APIs.

Simon Willison: Simon
aggregates lots of great web development content, and seems to have a
good eye for the future of Web technology.