DZone Refcardz

I tend to dabble in a lot of different technologies (in case you hadn't noticed). One of the issues this creates is that I will frequently be away from something long enough that I don't have all the syntax fully memorized anymore and I spend time looking up reference documentation or old code samples to work on something new. One of the great things I remember having in the 90s to combat this was Reference Cards (I had one for 'vi' that I carried around in grad school for a few months until it became part of my DNA).

Not having seen good reference cards for a long time, I was delighted to see the new "Refcardz" project by DZone. They are putting together high-quality written by leading experts in the given field. They are downloadable as PDFs and are totally free once you join DZone. So far, they already released cards on the following topics:

• Spring Configuration
• Getting Started with Ajax
• Getting Started with Eclipse
• GWT Style, Configuration and JSNI Reference
• Dependency Injection in EJB 3
• Windows PowerShell

I already love the 'Spring Configuration' card -- it has all the new namespace information from Spring 2.5 well assembled into 8 easy to use pages.

They are planning to publish a new card each week. Here are some of the upcoming entries:

• jQuery Selectors (June 9)
• Design Patterns (June 16)
• Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 (June 23)
• MS Silverlight 2 (June 30)
• IntelliJ IDEA (July 7)
• GlassFish Application Server (July 14)
• NetBeans IDE 6 Java Editor (July 21)

There is also an RSS feed available so you can be notified of each new card they release.

This is a great resource, especially for those of us who dabble in a lot of different areas.