Looking back at my career and life as a programmer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my programming skills - reading code, writing code, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching screencasts and more.

I need to extend my programming knowledge, I know as a system administrator, I should automate everything I need to do more than twice and therefore I need more programming skills. I've been thinking of learning shell programming, as it is the most ubiquitous in Linux systems. I already know some shell programming and for most of the simple tasks I can easily write a small shell script.

Today, Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the open source space. It’s a vast language and there are many gems to discover, so following on from the success of our previous Python tips article, we’ve compiled more tips to make your Python experience that much more worthwhile…

Expert PHP 5 Tools is a new book from Packt that will help users to take their PHP development skills to an enterprise level by teaching them the skills and tools essential to write maintainable and efficient code. It contains many well-documented code samples and recipes that can be used as a starting point for producing quality code.

It’s been almost a month since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m not a fan of Ubuntu, but Lucid Lynx, the code name for the latest version of Ubuntu, is, in so many ways, a better operating system to use than prior releases. However, it still falls short in some areas. This aim of this article is to offer customization tips to those new to the operating system.

"Hi guys and girls, this is the first guest post on my blog. It’s written by Waldner from #awk on FreeNode IRC Network. He works as a sysadmin and does shell scripting as a hobby. Waldner will be happy to take any questions about the article. You can ask them in the comments of this post or on IRC. This article takes a look at ten tips, tricks and pitfalls in Awk programming language.

Here are 5 funkalicious tips to improve your Linux desktop. Weather it be speed, or just look and feel, here are some of my favourites. (All these tips were written and fully work on a Ubuntu desktop, but theres no reason why they wont work on any other Linux distribution).

Producing code that clearly conveys a developer's intent is key to any well written application. That not only applies to PHP, but every programming language. Developers who emphasize the creation of legible code tend to create applications which are easier to both maintain and expand upon.

There are two kinds of fast in programming: Fast to code and fast to run. 3D applications and games are known to be speedy. But the time it takes to write and understand the code behind it? Not so much. On the flipside, many abstraction layers designed to make coding easier usually aren’t very efficient. So where’s the median? Meet Pyglet for Python.