"By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches." ~Proverbs 24:3-4
Computer Science
See Also: Computers & Software
Game reviews, software sources, computer curriculum, special needs technology, etc.
Visibooks: Computer Books for Visual Learners - Free online computer how-to tutorials based on pictures, not words. Visibooks are computer books that employ hundreds of large illustrations and very little text and are downloadable for free. Screen shots and diagrams show you exactly what to do and the illustrations guide you step-by-step through real-world tasks. The easiest way to learn computer subjects! Titles available include:
Web Know How The ultimate web development directory, WebKnowHow.net lists hundreds of tutorials and guides for all aspects of web design and authoring. Great resource!
Yale C/Aim Web Style Guide - You may want to make this your first stop once you have learned HTML and are ready to develop your web site. The Yale Style Guide is a comprehensive, well-written guide to all aspects of successful web pages including the purpose of your site and design strategies, links and navigation, site structure, design grids, typography, web graphics and web multimedia and animation.
Web Design Education Resources
Authoring for Web TV - Loads of information here on what formats are supported by Web TV and how to design your site for viewing on television.
Builder.com Web Authoring Tutorials - Tutorials and guides for learning HTML, Web building for beginners, Stupid Web Tricks, how to choose HTML Editors, power tools for HTML experts and more. Builder.com also provides reviews of available authoring software that you are sure to find useful.
Hotwired's Webmonkey - You'll find some of the best web design tutorials at Webmonkey: HTML, Design, Stylesheets, Graphic Design, Multimedia, Browsers, Java and lots more.
Publish - Great HTML tricks and web design articles.
Smart Webby Web Design Guide - The Smart Webby Web Design Guide is a collection of articles, tips, guidelines and resources on how to design attractive and fast-loading web sites. Also included are step-by-step tutorials and useful tips and tricks on Fireworks and Dreamweaver.
Web Developers Virtual Library - Another huge learning resource containing tutorials and guides for web authoring, design, and graphics.
Web Know How The ultimate web development directory, WebKnowHow.net lists hundreds of tutorials and guides for all aspects of web design and authoring. Great resource!
Yale C/Aim Web Style Guide - You may want to make this your first stop once you have learned HTML and are ready to develop your web site. The Yale Style Guide is a comprehensive, well-written guide to all aspects of successful web pages including the purpose of your site and design strategies, links and navigation, site structure, design grids, typography, web graphics and web multimedia and animation.
Online Design and Illustration Tutorials
PageLab PageLab shows you how to design cool stuff. John McWade, an award-winning publication designer has created these graphic design tutorials for you to learn and enjoy:
How to Design a Logo of Letters - shows you all the ways to coax, cajole and prod all kinds of letters into excellent logotypes.
Magic in Red, Green and Blue - illustrates the fascinating workings of red, green and blue (RGB) lights, how to spec exactly the colors you want, and the simple 20% rule for making perfect browser colors for display on the World Wide Web.
How to Design a Lettermark - an illustrated letter is an especially effective type of trademark. This tutorial shows you how to design one simply.
Multiples! - how to energize your design using multiples of a single image.
These graphic design tutorials are full of colour and examples, interactivity and animation, not to mention excellent information. If you want to see great design in action and learn from it, you'll want to see this site. Enjoy!
Mike's Sketchpad Choose from a huge, huge selection of online tutorials for desktop publishing and computer graphics at Mike's Sketchpad. Categories of design tutorials include: Photoshop, Corel, QuarkXPress, Deneba Canvas, Mastering Illustration, Porting, Animation and more.
Photoshop Tips & Tricks Graphic-Design.com offers a large collection of Photoshop tips & tricks, as well as free online Photoshop seminars.
TIEM Design Tutorials The Internet EYE Magazine offers hundreds of graphic design tutorials both online and downloadable in PDF format. Topics covered include: Illustrator, Photoshop, Corel, PaintShop Pro, Painter and more.
Desktop Publishing Tutorials You'll find a wide range of free online tutorials here on various desktop publishing topics: Scanning, Image Output, Text & Drawing, Color and Paint & Bitmaps.
Graphics Unleashed Visit Graphics Unleashed for a big selection of free online tutorials for Corel graphic products.
Tech Drawing Tools Serious technical illustrators will rejoice at the comprehensive collection of isometric illustration tutorials utilizing CorelDRAW at Tech Drawing Tools. Also at the site - Tech Drawing Tools software, tips and tricks, and symbol libraries.
Eyewire Tips Lots of online tutorials and tips for general design, Photoshop, PakeMaker, Illustrator, ImageReady and more.
Computer Arts Tutorials Computer Arts offers a large selection of free online tutorials for Photoshop, vector and 3D design.
Designer.com Designer.com is home to tips, tricks, articles, expert advice, free stuff and how-tos for CorelDraw, Corel PHOTO-PAINT and Corel VENTURA.
Free Cover Art Tutorial "Do It Yourself Cover Art Tutorial" is a free online (or downloadable) tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to create cover art for e-books. You'll learn how to create 3d books, boxes, magazines and more all from easy to use templates; rotate & skew text to any angle; add shadows, bevels, and other special effects; add and work with graphics; and where to get professional royalty free graphics.
Powerbacks 2000
Inexpensive creative backgrounds, specially designed for Microsoft® PowerPoint®, internationally available through online Downloads and CD-ROMs. Visit the site for a free background of the week download.
Typofile - Techniques & Technology Good tutorials here on the basics of using type, using typefaces together, and how to avoid the overused. Also try Esperfonto for help on choosing fonts.
Robin Williams Type Talk You'll enjoy these quick and informative insights to fonts and typographic design.
Microsoft Typography Microsoft's Typography is a huge learning and information resource for fonts, TrueType Typography, and typography for the web. You'll find typography news, font foundries information, type history, type magazines, utilities, and resources for developers.
Type Right For A Pro Look Webreference's Wendy Peck has put together an excellent set of tutorials on typography beginning with "Type Right for a Pro Look". Then you can continue your learning with: Controlling Text Position, Photoshop Typography, Photoshop Controlling Text, PaintShop Pro Typography, Fireworks Typography, and Fireworks Customizing Text.
Web Tools
Link Popularity A free online service that checks your link popularity. Because search engines are starting to use link popularity in the ranking determination, you'll want to monitor who's linking to your site and discover other sites you can exchange links with.
Keyword Counter Use this free keyword analyzer to compare keyword density of top words in URLs. Analyze density of your keywords before you submit to engines for one last check that your pages are fully optimized for high search engine rankings.
CBT Cafe
CBT café offers on-demand, free, video-based training movies for graphics and web design related programs including Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, QuickTime and Ebay Video Tutorials. The movies are free to anyone, anytime and only require the free, QuickTime plugin to watch them. HTML written tutorials are also available for people who prefer that learning style.
Dmitry's Design Lab
Dmitry's Design Lab at webreference.com takes up where standard HTML tutorials leave off with a look at the basics of proper design. Currently there are 25 free online tutorials in such diverse topics as Logo Design, The Art of Animation, Preparing for XML, The Flesh and Soul of Information, Size and Proportion in Web Graphics, The World of Color and much, much more. This is required reading for anyone involved in designing web sites!
The HTML Writers Guild
The world's largest international organization of Web authors with over 85,000 members in more than 130 nations worldwide. The HTML Guild is a great resource for web authoring and design and has a large variety of web publishing and design online courses available to it's members. A sample of an online classes offered:
Creating Web Graphics with Paint Shop Pro
Trial memberships are offered for free. A full membership is $49 per year and you can take the online courses at a reduced rate.
Free Online Graphics Tutorials & Tips
Vector Graphics 101
Learn to create Paintshop Pro cartoon graphics with the Toon cat!
Photoshop Tutorials
This tutorial will show you how to create shapes in Photoshop.
TrainingTools.com
Flash 5 Free Tutorial. Understand the main elements of the Flash interface and more.
Web Graphics, Backgrounds, & Colors
ColorMaker The various web browsers available often implement JavaScript differently or not at all. This site can help make the correct choice color.
Generating Colors in HTML Wonderful resource for selecting your website colours. The color samples in the tables on the pages are not images; they are generated by the HTML of this page. Netscape 3.0 (or higher) or Internet Explorer 2.0 (or higher) are required in order to view the samples.
ColorMaker The various web browsers available often implement JavaScript differently or not at all. This site can help make the correct choice color.
HTML Color Picker Another great resource for selecting website colors, just click on the color and the hex code is generated.
Bellsnwhistles.com Free web graphics and backgrounds plus animations, Java applets, Javascript, and more.
Pambytes This site contains hundreds of original, totally free web page graphics. These free images include page sets, tiled or seamless backgrounds, borders, arrows, themes, buttons, banners and clipart links.
Background City Your best source for backgrounds, all original and absolutely free!
Smart Web Center Backgrounds Free Public Domain Backgrounds: abstract, artistic, cloth, coarse textures, embossed, food, geometric, pictures and images, marble, metallic, nature, neon, patterns, rocks, shapes, sidebars, swirls, fine textures, tiles, transparent, wood.
All Free Backgrounds Hundreds of select free backgrounds and texture graphics for your website in most every color plus marble, paper, wood, business, nature, metal, brick and many more!
Handy Color tools help you choose which text and link colors look best for your web pages against each background.
Absolute Background Textures Archive Thousands of attractive background textures
for use in web pages, graphical software or on your desktop; sorted by color and motif.
Which Color Palette?
There is much discussion and confusion on the Web about color palettes. There is, in fact, no one universal 8-bit palette that will not dither on all platforms. There is, however, a 216-color palette that will not dither on most.
The Web-Safe Color Dilemma
You might have heard of the browser-safe palette, Netscape palette, 216 palette, Web palette, and/or 6x6x6 color cube. All these terms refer to the same set of colors, which this page will describe in detail.
Webmasters Color Laboratory
A clickable page showing colors and information to help you with Graphic design.
216 Web-Safe Color Chart
Colors are represented on the computer screen by the amount of red, green and blue displayed. The colors are created by mixing light. If all three are set to zero, black results. When red, green and blue are on 100%, the result is white.
Free Game Design Courses and Resources Online
Game Theory and Mechanism Design Course -
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a number of free game development and computer science courses through the school's OpenCourseWare project. All courses are downloadable and include lecture notes, problem sets and similar materials.
Instructional Games Course -
Like MIT, Utah State University offers several free downloadable courses through their OpenCourseWare Project. Courses that are of interest to game designers and developers include readings, class discussions and game design projects.
Introduction to Game Development -
Materials from a recent Tufts University Experimental College game development course can be accessed for free online, via the course website. Lectures, assignments, examples and resources are easy to view and include all of the information you need to get hands-on experience in computer game development.
Programming in C++ Course -
The University of Southern Queensland in Australia provides free access to sample courses online. Not many would be useful to aspiring game designers and developers, but there is a comprehensive C++ programming course that would be helpful to beginner and intermediate level programmers.
Principles of Game Design Course -
Alan Emrich has taught game design at the University of California at Irvine, The Art Institute of California and Stanford University. You can now view materials from his Principles of Game Design course online, including the syllabus, homework assignments and reading assignments. Rather than video games, this course focuses on the development and design of board games and card games.
Game Development Tutorial for Beginners -
GameDev.net is a complete resource for game developers. The site features an enormous collection of articles, tutorials and other resources. You'll also find job listings, product reviews, contests and more.
Tricks of 3D Game Programming Ebook -
LearnersTV.com is a massive site offering free video lectures, audio lectures, online tests, ebook downloads and forums. There is something new added every day and a handy search feature that can help you find exactly what you are looking for.
Game Maker Download -
YoYo Games doesn't offer a traditional game design and development course, but they do have a free downloadable game maker that lets you create your own video games. You'll also find zip file tutorials that will teach you how to design your own first person shooter games, maze games, 3-dimensional games, platform games and scrolling shooter games.
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