Hi All,

For those of you who do this for a living, do you ever have to look up how to do something or are you pretty much fluent in whatever languages you are using?

 

Brad.

I'm not a full timer (yet!), but I think its pretty common for all developers to look up things they can't remember. On that basis you don't need to get hung up on coding without references (although it might be a good exercise), because the internet is always just a few clicks away!

gah double post again

Like above 'mrchristoph' I also look up the code that I can't remember at that point.

 

Most of the code though I can normally just write out as I go along, although I am just a front end web designer using xhtml/css.

You're never done learning, especially with code. So yeah I look up lots of stuff I guess 99,99% of all coders do

^ what he said

 

With so many things I doubt whether anyone can remember absolutely everything

nope, you can't know everything - especially with the range of technologies we have to use. As long as you know the core stuff i.e. data types, control structures, operators. PHP in particular has a MASSIVE collection of functions, many of which do not adhere to a common pattern. Languages like Python on the other hand are very light on native functions.

Lot's of times. There's some stuff which I've always copied and pasted like conditional stylesheet code, if you asked me the correct syntax to use I wouldn't be able to answer without looking it up.

 

I do that with a lot of things. Even for many PHP functions - sometimes the parameter order is in the form $haystack, $needle but then for other functions its $needle,$haystack so I regularly have to consult php.net to make sure my variables are in the right order.

I know enough about CSS/XHTML to code without looking it up. But i also work with PHP, Actionscript, jquery and now learning CSS3 and HTML5, so my head is always in the bloody book! or watching lynda.com?

 

Like people have already said, you wont find many people who DON'T have to look something up throughout their day.

Personally the general 'house keeping' can be done of the top of my head but design and coding changes constantly so a certain degree of 'looking up' will always be involved.