Looking for examples of beautiful programming cheat sheets

May 10, 2013 2:42 AM

I have an urge to make a series of cheat sheets for a project that currently lacks them (the Grails web framework, if anyone's interested) and am looking for design inspiration. It's easy to find cheat sheets online, but most of them are (perfectly functional!) variations on zebra-striped tables. Googling for "well-designed cheat sheets" and similar gives results that contain cheat sheets for designers - I am looking for examples of well-designed cheat sheets that use color, typefaces etc. in a way that's information-dense but also pleasing to the eye. If anybody has links to examples of cheat sheets (for programming languages or otherwise), please leave a comment.
posted by primer_dimer to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Theoretical Computer Science/Mathematics cheat sheet which is part way down The TeX Showcase is certainly a thing of beauty if viewed at the source code level, because you should really use LaTeX for this project.
posted by anaelith at 4:37 AM on May 10, 2013

You could try expanding your search to "infographics", since that's really what a cheat sheet is. That might give you some more creative ideas.
posted by ashirys at 6:09 AM on May 10, 2013

I found this one recently - Vim Cheat-Sheet. I love a good cheat sheet, and have saved a few to Pinboard (hopefully that link works, let me know if it doesn't).
posted by ralan at 6:13 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

I bookmarked Ralan's collection on Pinboard! I'm a novice coder so this is fun stuff for me. You might want to try Smashing Magazine's posts tagged 'cheat sheet.' Some others I found:

- HTML cheat sheet from Skillcrush
- CSS 2 cheat sheet from Woork Up
- Another one from Woork Up, for HTML5
- This computer hardware one is not particularly beautiful, but impressively dense for the space constraints!
- Colorful jQuery one
- Arduino Programming

Mostly non-programming infographics that may be helpful:
GOOD Magazine's infographics, now archived on Flickr
Nerdgraph

I guess a cheat sheet is like a pared-down infographic... more about function/density of information, while infographics prioritize design and visual data. Seems like you are looking for something in between.
posted by perryfugue at 6:09 PM on May 12, 2013 [3 favorites]