This section provides an eclectic collection to resources on the World Wide Web and others that I find useful or informative. This selection is obviously neither complete nor all encompassing. Any remarks about broken links or suggestions for adding links to this page are very welcome. All links open in a new window.

Internet Engineering Task Force
The IETF community is the one that developed, maintains and enhances the Internet itself. What W3C is for the World Wide Web, is IETF for the Internet. Every programmer or IT professional should be familiar with this origin of the numerous RFC's that shape our Internet world.

World Wide Web Consortium
Since the Web is probably the most successful service running on the Internet, this home of the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, is to the Web what IETF is to the Internet. No serious designer or developer that incorporates web-based functionality into their services and products can ignore the standards for which W3C is responsible.

International Telecommunication Union
Another important standards body: the ITU standards are used world-wide and again, programmers that deal with traditional telecommunications will be unable to keep ignorant about them.

Real-time Spam Black Lists
Invaluable resource for network administrators that want to keep their mailservers as free of spam as possible. Most resources here are free to use and, more importantly, quite effective.

Wotsit's List of known File Formats
Almost every programmer will have come across the problem of being able to read/write other programme's file formats. This site contains a great many pointers to various well-known file formats.

Index of Algorithms and Data Structures
Very comprehensive list of definitions, acronyms organised in various areas, including automata and state machines, cryptography and compression, graphs, numeric computation, quantum computation, verification and formal methods, etc.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (ISBN 0465026567)

A brilliant book that every computer scientist must read. It presents cognitive science, debates the question of consciousness, self-reference, self-presentation, etc. and discusses artificial intelligence. It is also a book that attempts to discover what "self" really means. Every chapter is preceded by a dialogue in which Achilles, the Tortoise, and various others talk about different aspects that will be examined in the following chapter.

While the matters discussed here are by no means simple, Hofstadter writes about them in a very pleasant and passionate way. The works of Escher and J.S. Bach are discussed, as well as other works of art and music, but they are all part of the overall debate on mathematics and formal systems, meta-mathematics and programming, recursion and so on. Available through Amazon or other sources.

Erich Gamma et al, "Design Patterns"(ISBN: 0201633612)

Object Oriented programming has become widely adopted as the prevailing programming paradigm, and this book has very quickly become on of the classic works for programmers. It offers elegant solutions for algorithm and software design. Amongst the patterns it describes are managing object creation, composing objects into larger structures, and control and signalling between objects. Available through Amazon or other sources.

Martin Fowler et al, "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" (ISBN: 0201485672)

This book provides an extremely clear and well-structured system for improving existing class design and other Object Oriented code, as well as discussing a number of valuable techniques for better programming. No self-respecting programmer can do without. Available through Amazon or other sources.

This page was last updated 30 August 2003.