Programming Tip of the Day!

I'm a big fan of RSS. I rarely have time for reading entire blog entries, which is why Google Reader is a boon for skimming blog teasers. I think my favorite RSS subscriptions are the one-liners, "tips of the day," they're called. For example, I've got my Spanish phrase of the day, health tip of the day, and so on. I've always thought programming lends itself perfectly to feeds like this, something like a "script snippet of the day," or "MySQL query of the day," etc. You learn the Zen of programming from reading a beginner's book and you master a language by using it. But you're only every using what you know exists in that language, which limits you're programming boundaries. So a snippet a day can expose you to useful scripts and tools that you've never seen before, as well as help you practice the code you do know so you don't have to look it up every time.

So I made one such feed, which you can find here. Check the languages/tools to which you want to subscribe (there are only a few right now, the ones that I want to learn since I initially created this for myself) and click 'subscribe'. Currently, if you subscribe to three languages, you get three tips a day. If you subscribe to one language, one tip a day, etc. I'm working on letting the subscriber choose how many tips a day he/she wants. Also, I'm working on getting more tip categories in there. If enough people respond to this post, I'll post tip categories faster. Also, make requests, because requested categories go up first.

These tips come from the following Googled "cheat sheets":

• Drupal - MineZone Blog
• MySQL - Neil Parikh's Blog
• Linux - Linux Command Line Tips
• Vim - Vim Commands Cheat Sheet