Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, And Others [Collection Of Incredibly Useful Lists]

Artem Russakovskii — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:38:56 +0000

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to bookmark this page and return to it later when the fires have been put out.

Update 06/21/09: I think I've got the situation under control now. The load is between 0 and 3 now and pages load relatively fast. I will be posting about the getting redditted/delicioused experience later.

Update 06/23/09: Added jQuery, Greasemonkey, Ruby on Rails, and Objective-C, broke databases into their own section, and sorted everything alphabetically.

Update 06/23/09: Added Scala, Lua, TCL, F#, Regex, and HTTP.

Update 07/21/09: Added ActionScript3/Flex, Erlang, PL/SQL, Silverlight, VBA, VHDL, WPF/XAML.

Update 10/24/09: Added Flash development/language/IDE, Emacs, Xpath/Xslt, Spring framework.

Update 01/18/10: Added Android (asked by yours truly), Qt, Django, Windows.Forms, R, Lisp, x86 assembly, Grails.

So, one day someone at StackOverflow started a "Hidden features of" post about a famous language (I don't feel like finding out which one was first exactly), and it turned out to be so popular that other posts in the same series started popping up.

Such questions were quickly turned into community wikis, for the purposes of harvesting and organizing information coming from the best developers on the planet and voted by users of the site. There are literally hundreds of answers, sorted by votes.

The Hidden Features series is great for people who are new to a certain language. It shows the ropes and tricks, all in one place, in the most concise manner possible. Even pros oftentimes find features of their favorite language that they'd never heard about.