The last few months Chris Mills from Opera was busy gathering a lot of great web development experts around him (with a lot of pimping by yours truly) to assemble probably the most thorough and up-to-date web standards curriculum on the web: The Opera Web Standard Curriculum

Several dozen articles, all licensed with Creative Commons will be available to cover the tasks of web development: from understanding the principles of the web up to Ajax interaction. During the whole course the main focus is on usability, accessibility and writing maintainable code. We deliberately left out browser hacks and backward facing solutions and build on the ideas of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JavaScript.

I wished this would’ve been out when I started, it’d have saved me a lot of time learning bad practices and un-learning them (which is always a painful process).

So, read it, use it and teach younglings the way of the standards Jedi: The Opera Web Standard Curriculum

It is quite cool to see the increase of coverage of the topic of web APIs. It is also very exciting to APIs finally evolving to work across several systems, aggregate and move from a one way stream of retrieving data to an alternative entry point for applications. How cool will it be for example to write reviews for amazon on movie or book sites? Having write APIs would allow us to leverage the knowledge of people on the web at the places they hang out rather than having to lure them into using a web app.

Anyways with this new API interest I had a triple release today: There is a podcast about APIs for .net magazine together with Jeremy Keith, Paul Hammond, Drew McLellan and hosted by Paul Boag, Ajaxian is featuring my ‘hack’ of the Slideshare RSS feed and I uploaded the presentations I gave at the University Hack Day introduction at Dundee, Scotland yesterday.

• Building Web Hack Interfaces
• Introduction to Hacking for University Hack Day

Enjoy!