Coding Horror

programming and human factors

I Heart Cheatsheets

I'm a huge fan of Beagle Brothers style cheat sheets, because nothing promotes the illusion of mastery like a densely packed chart of obscure reference information:

Beagle Brothers Apple II colors and ASCII values Beagle Brothers Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers
Beagle Brothers Tips, Tricks, and Techniques Beagle Brothers 6502 Instructions

Just throw some of those babies up on your walls and people will know that they're clearly dealing with a coding genius!

VisiBone makes great modern equivalents of these classic references, and they're available in dense card, dense foldout, large print book, and huge wall chart formats. The Visibone regular expression reference is the best concise regex reference I've found to date -- and there's a free online version, too. It is limited to the JavaScript regex syntax, but that's 98 percent of what most people will need.

I've seen the CSS Cheat Sheet before, but I didn't realize there's an entire set of cheatsheets freely available from the same site:

These are all conveniently provided in PDF or PNG formats. If you're a Microsoft .NET programmer, there's no shortage of cheatsheets for you as well:

If you don't see the one you want, here are few other sites that aggregate cheatsheets. Many of them are open-source / UNIX oriented, but they run the gamut.

Know of any other good cheatsheets not listed here? Share in the comments!

Written by Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror