ReadWriteWeb

Do you want to build a game for Android, a theme for your blog or a twitter desktop client? Have a great idea but lack the development chops to take it from the pages of your legal pad to the App Store? Want to make sure your kid learns to program, even though your local school system may not offer the best options? This post should give you a good starting point for learning to program.

We have many developers who read ReadWriteWeb, so this post is meant to both be a help for aspiring programmers and a place for those of you with much more knowledge than I, to drop in suggestions. Please let me know what we've inevitably left out.

Do you code at home, away from co-worker's interruptions? Or do you prefer a public setting, perhaps with colleagues? Or do you do you work in a conventional setting, at your place of employment?

Let us know where you work.

James Schorr, the owner of Tech Rescue has a guest post on the Ruby Learning blog where he asks "Do You Enjoy Your Code Quality?" He makes a strong argument for treating programming as craftsmanship writing that the goal of his article is to help people improve code quality and "transform the mundane into the beautiful."

Schorr offers a number of tips for pre- through post-development of projects, and while some of his points may be geared towards independent consultants and independent developers, they're pretty applicable to anyone:

Every entrepreneur will tell you that recruiting the right candidate is important. While startups are constantly trying to find programmers that mesh well with their culture, team and work-style, one article suggests that companies still struggle finding candidates that know how to program at all. Jeff Atwood published a post this morning entitled, The Non-Programming Programmer with a stunning look at how many interviewees misrepresent their abilities.

Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.

One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Bespin is an online code editor from Mozilla Labs. When Bespin was first announced, one of the high-level goals of the projects was to enable real-time collaboration. Now, in version 0.4, the team has made good on this promise and released a beta version of its new collaboration tools. Some graphical elements are still missing, but with the help of a few text commands, users can already follow other users, organize users into groups, and share projects with others.

U.S. government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and blip.tv, using special service agreements that comply with federal terms and conditions. Today, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that, after nine months of negotiations, the government has signed agreements with these companies that will allow federal agencies to officially post content to these sites. The GSA is also negotiating special terms and conditions with MySpace and Facebook, and it has already determined that Twitter's service agreement is in line with federal requirements.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

YouTube launched a handy new page last night that aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US. YouTube.com/edu now serves up campus tours, free lectures, research and other college news all in one place. Search queries can be limited to the Edu part of the site as well.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.

Digg for programming questions? Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror start letting users into their well built site.

The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.