Every hacker should have a good solid dead tree library to draw ideas from and use as reference material. This list has a bit of everything - textbooks you will encounter at top tier computer science universities, books giving insight into the industry, and references you shouldn’t be caught without. It is a list of hackers’ classics. (more…)

A sweet hack can be a clever piece of code, an innovative way of solving a technical problem, or just a cool use of technology. I put together a list of 5 hacks that I think are really sweet.

I am making Sweet Hacks a regular series here at GrokCode, turning it into a blog carnival that runs every three months. If you would like to nominate your own sweet hack for the next issue, send an email to jess [AT] grok-code.com with a short description of the hack and a link. Or if you are a del.icio.us user, tag the page “for:grokcode” to put it into my “links for you section.” (more…)

Every developer should have a collection of tools that at their disposal to facilitate project planning stages, speed development, automate testing and building, organize code versions, and otherwise make life easier. Here is a list of the standard tools in my toolbox that make me more productive. Almost all of them are F/OSS and multi-platform. This list has a slight Java slant, but most of these tools are language independent. (more…)