Are cheatsheets useful

Question

There seem to be a lot of requests for "cheatsheets" for various languages and technologies on SO.

I was surprised by this because I have always found things like that to be of limited use. I find if someone gives me a cheatsheet for something new then it acts as a disincentive to actually learn the new thing properly.

I find I learn far more if when I need to know something, I go off and trawl the documentation or object browser to find out about it, rather than leaning on a cheatsheet.

The programmers I have come across who use cheatsheets a lot are also the unadventurous ones who are unlikely to learn new techniques or patterns without prompting.

So, are cheatsheets a good or bad thing ?

Answer 1

DZone has some excellent cheatsheets ("reference cards") that I do actually use. I find them useful for things like regular expression syntax and jQuery selectors but not so much for more complex things like Spring.

I don't think they're a substitute for learning something (or even a disincentive). If it enables to do something you couldn't otherwise do then by definition you've learnt something (or will have after you do it a few more times).

Answer 2

I think they're a good thing, but mostly for use after you've learned something.

You learn something new, then perhaps don't use it for a few weeks... the cheat sheet acts as a reminder.

Answer 3

When it comes to quickly looking a way to perform some simple task or how to use a common data structure in an unfamiliar language, a cheet sheet can be helpful.

For example, I know what hashtables are. I know what arrays are. But, I can't quite remember how to use hashes in Perl. How do you make an array in JavaScript? For those types of questions, a cheat sheet can be handy.

Cheat sheets aren't going to be a good source of information to learn a language, but for a quick reference to perform basic tasks, it is a nice handy source of information.

Answer 4

I regularly have to look at my regular expression cheatsheet. I agree with RoBorg, I doubt it that they are very useful if you start learning something.

For me, with regular expressions, I sort of know them, but don't use them regular enough that all the little things stay in my mind. For such a situation a cheatsheet is pretty nice.

Answer 5

Yeah I just trawl the internet or search the documentation. If you can get what you want quickly this way, it works well. For example, I use the Visual Studio 2008 documentation, and when you search the index for, say, "String class" it goes there instantly. So no need for cheatsheets then. I also use sites like cplusplus.com and www.quickref.org and you can get what you need instantly really. I haven't found a need to have a cheatsheet yet.

Answer 6

I don't need cheat sheets when my development environment can show the needed part of the reference documentation very easily. Either from command line (like pydoc for python) or IDE showing it in tooltip or some secondary view. If that isn't enough, the next step is to open reference documentation with web browser.