Social media sites have gone mainstream over the past few years, and it’s affected web developers everywhere. With the success of sites like Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Delicious and Friendfeed, many developers have turned to adopting some of the practices of social media into their own sites. In fact, it’s not that hard to build your own social news portal, with the help of a few key coding techniques and libraries.

Here you’ll learn 10 clever coding techniques to help you build killer social media websites for yourself and your clients.

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Working with CSS can seem like a constant battle. Browsers are always changing they way they read the code (*cough* Internet Explorer *cough*), and it seems that there are lots of tiny little CSS “gotchas”. While it’s an incredibly powerful language, it can easily be used incorrectly, which will doom your development to a lifetime of imperfections.

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As web developers, it only makes sense that we find learning resources on our preferred medium, the Internet. However, there are definite pluses to the Old School method of learning; the print book. They’ve been through rigorous editing cycles, and you can trust solid publishers like O’Reilly. Also, you can trust the user ratings and comments that are on sites like Amazon. You can make an informed purchase with the help of these comments, and you don’t have to worry that these highly-rated titles are going to be accurate or poorly written. Publishing contracts are generally only given to industry and thought leaders who are worth listening to and learning from.

Here are 50 of the highest-rated, most respected print publications on many different web development topics.

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Rails has seemingly set the web development world on fire these past few years. Popular web applications like Basecamp and Twitter have pushed Rails into the limelight as an excellent framework that any programmer (or even non-programmer) can quickly use to create applications.

One of the most popular aspects of Rails is how easy and intuitive it is to start using right out of the box. Here are 10 tips that beginners can use to help with getting started with the powerful framework.

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In a time of economic crisis, web developers and freelancers everywhere have started chewing their fingernails. However, no matter how bad the economy worsens, there will always be work in certain booming fields of web development.

As the moderator of the Freelance Switch job board, there are certain types of jobs that are constantly in demand. Here are the 10 skills that are or will be in highest demand for developers. If you are proficient in these skills, you’ll be in a great position to find work and weather any economic downturn.

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Blog Action Day is a huge initiative launched by NETTUTS owners Collis and Cyan Ta’eed. There was almost no possible way you didn’t hear about Blog Action Day on October 15th, 2007, as over 20,000 blogs and 19 of Technorati’s top 100 participated and wrote posts on the topic of the environment. This year’s Blog Action Day, (which is happening as we speak), is turning that focus to poverty.

Building a site that can withstand a huge surge of traffic on one day takes considerable planning and work, as well as a little creativity. Collis has shared with me some of the inner workings of the Blog Action Day site and how they built the website to provide a platform for action, bring a community together and handle torrents of traffic on one day.

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There are a few special techniques or effects that can spice up just about any web page. These are the top 20 Ajax effects that every web developer should know. They’re essential parts of any web developer’s toolbox. If you haven’t seen them yet, you no doubt will in your future web development endeavors.

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There are quite a few great little tricks and tips one could use on their Django projects that would speed up development and save many headaches in the long run. From basic to obscure, these tips can help any skill-level of programmer become more adept with Django and all it’s glory.

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JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages in web development. It’s simple, yet very powerful, and the number of ways that it can be used are almost limitless. That’s why it’s so important to gather advice from those who have gone before you. Here are 10 tips from well-respected web developers within the JavaScript community.

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Javascript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user’s experience. Here are 10 simple and clever Javascript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any webpage.

Javascript is typically used as an aesthetic language in web development. This means that web developers should almost always be using Javascript for one thing only: Improving the visitor’s experience. There are many clever and useful ways to improve a site from the user interface perspective. A developer can find nearly any snippet of Javascript to achieve what he or she wants to accomplish.

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