Recommended Reference Books

Here's a selection of my favourite development books, see more and read my reviews.

Learning jQuery 1.3

Read my review: Learning jQuery 1.3

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developers Guide to SEO

Tools, Apps and Resources

Here is a list of free applications, tools and web resources that I use or find useful.

Firefox: The Firefox browser.
Web Developer Toolbar: If you're a web developer and use Firefox you should be using this toolbar, you'll wonder how you managed without it.
Firebug: Another Firefox plug-in that makes web development enjoyable.
Netcraft Toolbar: An anti-phishing toolbar, IE and Firefox versions available.
Live HTTP Headers Firefox Toolbar: View the HTTP header information as you request a page. Very useful for checking if you have redirects set-up correctly.
Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express: Microsoft's free visual web developer IDE, essentially a cut down version of Visual Studio especially tailored to the web developer.
WinDiff.exe: WinDiff is a Microsoft file comparision program, distributed with certain versions of Visual Studio. It can be invaluable when trying to compare two different code files. Also available as part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools.
LINQPad: LINQPad lets you query SQL databases in LINQ to SQL.
NUnit: NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages.
Window Live Writer: Live Writer is a very clean desktop UI for blogging and can be used on almost any blog service — Windows Live, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad...
Web Application Stress Tool: Web Application Stress Tool (WAS) is a Microsoft tool used to simulate multiple browsers accessing a website. It comes in handy when you need to test your web applications for scalability and your hardware for user loading/performance before you deploy them.
jQuery Blogger.com Tag Cloud Plugin: A jQuery Tag Cloud I created especially for Blogger.com classic templates to enable Blogger fans to display a tag cloud on their blogs.
An Introduction to Web Development and Design for Work Experience Students [PDF]: A 1 week programme I wrote, designed for students interested in web development. They will learn basic HTML, CSS, XML as well as produce their own portfolio website with their new skills.
Internetwork Training: Free Cisco CCNA Networking Quiz.
PC Technician: A+ Certification Blog.
Wingdings and Webdings Character Reference: A useful reference to Wingdings and Webdings character sets.
My HTML guide for beginners: These were the notes I produced to teach editorial staff how to tag basic HTML.
Curly Quote Convertor: This useful tool is used to convert extended ASCII characters like © and é into there HTML equivalent ©, é. I wrote this to make my life a little easier! This will only work on Internet Explorer as it uses client-side VBScript.
Zonealarm Free: Zonealarm's free version of their software firewall.
AVG Free Anti-virus: Grisoft's free version of AVG anti-virus.
Spybot Search & Destroy: Spybot Search & Destroy spyware remover.
A.F.5 Rename your files: A great tool to batch rename your files.
Quick Replace: A useful little stand-alone executable utility that can perform find and replace commands on huge text files in seconds. Try doing this kind of operation using notepad.exe and you'll be waiting for a long time!
Cisco Threaded Case Study: During the later stages of my Cisco CCNA course in 2002 one of our projects was to design a school network and to document it all using web pages. This is the site I designed and created to show off our team's work.