Google's new web site Doctype rounds up web development tips, tricks, and best practices in an editable format à la Wikipedia. Whether you dabble in HTML on your blog or you're a full-on web professional, this one's worth adding to your reference toolbox. [via]

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If you saw Adam's recent Hive Five roundup of text editors, you might have noticed that Vim, a child of Unix/Linux favourite Vi, still carries a lot of favour among coders and back-to-basics text workers. Now you can try out Vi and all its shortcut/macro goodness online with jsvi, a JavaScript-written clone of the basic Vi interface. It's obviously focused on code, carrying substitutions and spell checking for the most common languages, but it's a fun place to try out coding for newcomers, or for programmers to do a little quick hacking when they're away from their systems.

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Reader Sheila considers herself a power user but wants to extend her tech skills to programming. She writes in:

The more I hear about people automating things with scripts and programs they write themselves, the more it seems that being able to write code is a good skill to have—at any job. I'm not a programmer, but I'm interested in maybe becoming one. What's the best language for someone who's savvy but still very much a beginner to learn?

We've got our own opinions on this, but first we want to hear from you. All the coders out there: where should an aspiring programmer start? Help us point Sheila in the right direction in the comments.

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Need to pick up a little AJAX knowledge to give your website a bit of polish? Have less than a robust knowledge of how databases work? Google Code University offers a heaping helping of computer science knowledge for free. Even better, the site includes a CS Curriculum Search, which can find programming topics within materials published by the world's computer science schools. So if you only need a specific bit of PHP knowledge to move a project along, you might find just what you're looking for without having to plunk down cash for a thick manual. Would-be hackers looking into Firefox extensions and basic JavaScript, this is a great place to start.

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A computer programmer who's out to re-program himself has written a set of "personal unit tests" he "runs" every morning to check himself. Coders out there know that unit tests are small programs that run on a daily basis to make sure your software is doing everything it should. These personal unit tests include:

Exercise (health) - Pass iff I got at least 20 minutes of any kind of exercise yesterday.

Empty inbox (mind) - Pass iff, at some point over the course of yesterday, my email inbox was empty.

Those "iff"'s aren't typo's, either—they're programmer shorthand for "if and only if." What would your personal unit tests look like? Tell us in the comments.