Learning through books can take some time and can be a major hindrance for people who find the learn-by-the-book method dry an uninspiring. In a bid to make learning the language of the Web more interesting, some designers and developers have come together and created some interesting and useful web projects.

The first of the lot is dontfeartheinternet.com. Created by designers Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer; ‘dontfeartheinternet’ is a set of video lectures that teach you about html, css, and browsers, right from scratch. The lectures are mostly targeted towards print designers unfamiliar with the Web medium.

The other is teamtreehouse.com. In the same league as the above site, teamtreehouse.com is a more comprehensive site, providing lectures in Web Design, Web Development and iOS development, and provides test questions after each video lecture. Although not free, teamtreehouse.com can help you quickly learn Web development fundamentals in a structured way.

And the final site, codecademy.com. This is more targeted for people wanting to learn JavaScript in an interactive way. The best part is that it is free.

As you can see it is blazingly fast, being twice as fast as Firefox 3 and twenty times faster than Internet Explorer 6.  If you are using JavaScript heavy applications like Gmail or Javascript UI frameworks like Yahoo UI, extJS, jQuery etc. than you can really reap the benefits of a fast engine. If you like to see a visual comparison try running one of John Resig’s Processing.js demo in Firefox 3 and Chrome and you can see how fast Chrome can run JavaScript.

Some of the other interesting things Google Chrome offers can be read in a comic format here – designed by the brilliant Scott McCloud, a sample page is shown below.

You can download Google Chrome here.

With the help of WebSlices you can keep your users connected to your site. Any content on your site that regularly changes can be tagged as a WebSlice. For e.g products, horoscopes, weather, stocks, news, photos.

For example ebay has a search page for ie8 that supports WebSlice. Lets say I have to track a particular product on eBay for bid amount and other details. Whenever you navigate to a website that supports WebSlice a discovery button highlights as show below for the following url: http://ie8.ebay.com/

Now whenever you hover over a portion of a WebSlice, a icon pops up which you can click so as to add the WebSlice to your favorites bar.

Shown below is the WebSlice for the above link.

Whenever the content for this particular portion changes, the corresponding WebSlice is automatically updated. Now I don’t have to visit eBay to see the latest update on the product I’m interested in. I get to see the updates on the particular WebSlice. Whenever the slice content is updated the title of the slice on the favorites bar turns to bold.

The HTML that is displayed in the WebSlices details view comes from the description property of a WebSlice, which is set by the developer during design. The preview window has limited ability though; for example, the window allows no scripting or form controls.

Creating your own WebSlices:
You just have to wrap whatever content that you want to become a WebSlice in a div tag, and set the class name for the div as ‘hslice’.

There are a few sub elements that you can use to further define the WebSlice: ‘entry-title’, ‘entry-content’ and ‘ttl’ … among others.

<div id="1" class="hslice">
<p class="entry-title">Item - $80.00</p>
 
<div class="entry-content">high bidder: buyer9 …</div>
</div>

Conclusion:
At first it looked a little unremarkable but after trying some examples myself I think it could be a neat feature to add to your web pages.