Revamping, upgrading software, upgrading knowledge, while doing the daily long hours on the job, would all be a drag it it wasn’t in the invigorating field of creativity and in the rewarding context of social media. One of the most satisfying phenomena is the wonderful generosity of web developers who seed the Internet with a wealth of resources—blog comments, knowledge bases, scripts, tutorials. Need to know how to get the “gap in the thumbnails” in the NextGen Gallery fixed? A quick Yahoo search for “NextGen Gallery thumbnail gaps” and your prayer is answered in a WordPress Forum! No need to diddle around if you can nail the right words for the search engine.

Next on the agenda of helpful resources are those that cost a little, but are well worth the reward of well organized curriculum, sample software project files, and excellent video instruction. Lynda.com falls squarely into this category. Hard to imagine a better approach to teaching. With the broad range of improvements and new options in the Adobe CS4 collection of software, Lynda.com is the most effective way to get up to speed with this powerful array of tools. 

The makeover in Adobe’s Flash, for example, is a whole new world. Actionscript 3.0 nullifys its predecessors. As Flash is such a powerful media tool and so effectively integrates with Adobe Air, it behooves any web developer to get primed in this great latest version of Flash. Watch for samples posted here, in the Gallery and integrated into the Gallery websites.