We recently blogged about the site DevBistro, which is a source for technical interview questions.‚ Another helpful resource for technical recruiters is a website called WhatIs, which claims its stake as “the leading IT encyclopedia and learning center”.‚ 

I highly recommend bookmarking this site as your “go to” resource for answers to any of your questions about technology.‚  The site is set up in a way that is very easy to navigate to find the info you need quickly and efficiently.‚ On the main page is a large list of technical categories.‚ You can also do a keyword search for the technology that is in question or you can browse topics alphabetically.‚ When I am trying to find a particular topic, I prefer searching alphabetically, because sometimes you might not have the correct name or spelling and you won’t find what you’re looking for.‚ 

The definitions that you get from WhatIs are pulled from a variety of different sites, but they are all part of the TechTarget family of sites, which happens to be who runs WhatIs also.‚ Say you want to learn what JavaScript actually is.‚  Below is the result of my search on JavaScript, you can get an idea of what the definitions look like.

I find the definitions on WhatIs to be pretty easy to understand for a non-technical person, and they make sure to add links to other technologies referenced in the definition in case you want to research further.‚ WhatIs might not be the best place to search for some obscure technologies; I couldn’t even find a definition for Java Server Faces (JSF) on the site.‚  However, if you do a keyword search on a technology that doesn’t have a definition, you are still presented with web results that could help answer your questions.

One interesting feature that I just found while writing this blog is a “How do you pronounce IT?” section which lists a bunch of odd names of technologies or acronyms that are sometimes confusing for people who don’t deal with these names on an everyday basis.‚ Now we can really sound like we know what we’re talking about when we’re talking to techies!

Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform