A friend just put me onto what appears to be the largest collection of “cheat sheets” in the known universe. OverAPI.com provides access to reference cards on far more languages and applications than I have even heard of. From .NET to Zen coding, Lisp to Python, Gimp to Perforce, … Lua to Symfony? In fact, there are even cheat sheets on this site for guitar keys, geometry, and probability theory. For just the letter M alone, there are references for Mac, Mac OS X, Machine Learning, Maple, Markdown, Math, Mathematica, MathML, Mathomatic, MATLAB, Maven, Maxima, MFC, Microformats, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft VS, MIME, mod_include, mod_perl, mod_rewrite, MooTools, MSP, Mule, Music, MVVM, MySQL, and MediaWiki. Plus one of these subjects might lead to a series of cheat sheets, not just a single page of commands. Take the Perl section for example. It contains 9 individual references, plus some backups, to reference cards available on different sites. The site is actually a series of both pages and links to pages on other sites that has been put together to provide easy access to some of the best reference material available on various lanuages and systems. Take the reference card for “regex” (regular expressions) for example. In an attractively formatted page (plus a little more) of groupings, the site provides information on anchors (such as ^ and b), modifiers, quantifiers, groups and ranges, character classes, assertions, metacharacters, POSIX expressions auch as [:punct:] and string replacement. The examples are also followed by explanations showing, for example, that (abc){2} matches abcabc and that [:alnum:] matches both digits and letters. The MySQL sheet is at least as useful with data types, operators, functions (string and numeric), plus grouping and encryption options, sample queries and quite a bit more. When you visit the site, you’ll notice that there are two sections to the material — the icons at the top that lead to reference sheets on the site itself — all using the same (very attractive) format. The organized-by-letter sections below group languages or topics by first letter and generally lead to a page that contains one to many references to material on other sites. This is all very nice material that might save you a lot of time, especially when you’re starting out with a new language or just want some syntax help now and then. Thanks to Fred Stluka for a useful tip. OverAPI is a real find.
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