Another 20 Docs and Guides for Front-End Developers

We’re well into 2015 and I’m sure you’re feeling one of two ways right about now:

1. Really overwhelmed at how much there is to learn in this industry, or

2. Hungry for more and can’t wait for some new ideas for what to learn next.

Okay, I suppose it might be a combination of the two – the first coming out of our personal feelings and the second out of sheer necessity.

So to help you out, I’ve compiled another list of useful documentation, info-sites, and guides related to various areas of front-end development.

1. I want to use

Based on data and features listed on Can I use, this app gives you the ability to select a number of front-end development features and get a percentage readout of the number of users worldwide that will see the features you choose.

2. Regulex

A client-side, regular expression visualizer with a precise error indicator, should you have a syntax error in your expression. Also offers an option to embed the output anywhere, using an iframe.

3. Mastering the :nth-child

A one-page website to help you grasp how to use the various useful but often complex nth-child based selector combinations.

4. HTML5 Video Events and API

“This page demonstrates the new HTML5 video element, its media API, and the media events. Play, pause, and seek in the entire video, change the volume, mute, change the playback rate (including going into negative values). See the effect on the video and on the underlying events and properties.”

5. Excess XSS

This is probably a topic that all developers should be familiar with, and this might be a great place to start. It’s a comprehensive tutorial on cross-site scripting, a description of potential types of attacks, along with solutions for preventing them.

6. RSCSS

Meaning “Reasonable Standard for CSS Stylesheet Structure”, a work in progress to document some tips and techniques for writing Sass/CSS for very large projects.

7. CodeFightClub

“A project built by Andrew Hathaway with the aim to help fellow developers learn how to write their code in the nicest, most efficient and preferred way they can. To decide which code is the most preferred way, users can comment and vote against a fight for their favourite contender.” The site is divided into categories by programming languages, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot here yet, but you can help by adding to it and starting some “code fights”.

8. Sass Guidelines

From the Sass master himself, Hugo Giraudel, “an opinionated styleguide for writing sane, maintainable and scalable Sass.” The guide has already been translated into 6 other languages.

9. Flexbugs

“A community-curated list of flexbox issues and cross-browser workarounds for them. The goal is that if you’re building a website using flexbox and something isn’t working as you’d expect, you can find the solution here.” Definitely a must-bookmark for those starting to build new layouts with Flexbox.

10. A Front End Engineer’s Manifesto

Nothing too in-depth, just a simple set of reminders of stuff that all front-end developers should consider incorporating into their development process and workflow.

11. ECMAScript 6 equivalents in ES5

A nice reference for converting ES6 features to ES5-compatible code. Very useful considering ES5 has great support but ES6 doesn’t.

12. Flexbox Adventures

An in-depth, practical look at Flexbox, from Aussie-based developer Chris Wright. He’s also posted Using Flexbox Today, which tries to help you make the move to Flexbox in a logical, pragmatic manner.

13. Get BEM

A comprehensive site promoting and educating in the use of the popular BEM CSS methodology.

14. Sass Compatibility

“Reporting incompatibilities between different Sass engines.”

15. HTMLelement.info

A neat, logical, easy to use guide to get information on different HTML elements from the spec.

16. JSLint Error Explanations

If you’re like me, you probably follow a lot of JavaScript best practices, but maybe don’t understand all the reasons behind those techniques. This site aims to demystify the errors and warnings you find in the popular linting tools JSLint, JSHint, and ESLint.

17. Animations — Web Fundamentals

There’s lots of good info in Google’s Web Fundamentals documentation, but this one stands out for front-end devs in particular because of the importance of applying some good practices when animating UI elements.

18. Favicon Cheat Sheet

“A painfully obsessive cheat sheet to favicon sizes/types.” Compiled from a number of different popular articles that discussed the ins and outs of favicons across desktop and mobile.

19. The CSS at…

If you want your fill of CSS styleguides from some of the big players, Chris Coyier has put together a table with info and links to the various posts that were sort of trending for a couple of months last year. I’m sure he’ll continue to update this as others go public with their CSS methodologies and practices.

20. Dash

Finally, a native Mac or iOS app that is “an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 150+ APIs.” This one’s great for pretty much any kind of developer.

Suggest Yours

We don’t do too many “list posts” at SitePoint, but this is the third such post I’ve done over the past year, with a pretty good response. Here are the other two, in case you missed those, or if you’re just a learning masochist:

• 20 Useful Docs and Guides for Front-End Developers
• 20 More Docs and Guides for Front-End Developers

If you know of any others not included in these posts, or if you’ve built or written something similar of your own, feel free to let us know in the discussion.