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Comment by Nightshaxx | Hacker News Reader

As someone who just graduated college and found geeksforgeeks, cplusplusreference, and w3schools quite helpful for Algorithms, c++ Syntax, and learning some basic web design stuff (respectively).....what should I be using? I see a lot of people hating on them....but they all seemed alright to me. Is it just because they are too basic? (I used a lot of these things for just learning basic things I either forgot the syntax for or needed a quick introduction).

I'd especially like to know for c++.

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The complaints about these sites is usually that (a) they're literally wrong just often enough that you don't want to rely on them, which defeats the point of a reference, or (b) they try to "teach" things that are not recommended best practices. With w3schools in particular, there's the added "ick" that they try very hard to make it look like they're an offical W3C source, and sell scammy certifications based on that confusion. They also provided (past tense, because I haven't looked at it in years) some very questionable practices with PHP that would lead to trivially insecure code.

cppreference.com is what I usually use for C++. It's well organized, well cross-linked, and uses exact standards language whenever possible. It's also very good about showing the differences between successive versions of the C++ standard libraries, which is invaluable if you're working with any sort of legacy code and wondering why something looks funny.

For HTML5/JS, MDN (Mozilla) was my default when I did front-end, but it's been a little while. I'm sure Mozilla is still great, but there might also be something easier to traverse.

Ahhhh.....you know what, now that I think about it, I remember last semester for a class I had to do a bunch of PHP + SQL for a Backend (my first time really using either). I basically just googled a bunch of stuff and I ended up just writing the queries in as strings basically because that's what I saw on a site (very possibly one of the ones in question).

I felt it was wrong because I was concerned about SQL injection, but my professor really didn't care about security so I wasn't too too concerned. Later on my professor mentioned that pre-compiled statements (I think that's what they are called) and I facepalmed because that would have been way more secure and been 5x easier anyways.

So yea, I guess they still are giving bad advice.

For me, the information tends to be incomplete that it’s hard to use as a reference, which is often why I am searching in the first place. For example look at JavaScript Array reduce function in w3schools [0] and MDN [1] and try to decide the exact result when you pass only one argument to the function. MDN is very precise about the behavior and w3schools basically forces you to test and see.

[0] https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_reduce.asp [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

The're basic but that's not the real problem. Plenty of articles are basic but also offer unique perspective or insight. The real problem is that these articles are often uninspired and seemingly only written for the purpose of writing an article. Full of keywords to maximize google search potential. And then your technical search gets bogged down by these SEO friendly articles and you can't find what you need.

Its a lot worse for python than, say, kotlin. That was one of the biggest things I noticed when changing languages recently.

For C++, I use cppreference.com and stackoverflow almost exlusively

If I installed this extension, cplusplus.com would be the very first thing to go on my blacklist. I always want cppreference.com.

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