I love compendia like this: Knuth's TAOCP volumes, NVIDIA's GPU Gems books, the HAKMEM memo, Hacker's Delight, Programming Pearls, etc.

Has there been anything like these centered around the web?

The Rails source code?

You know you have access to some tasty kool-aid when you start comparing the rails source code to TAOCP.

I remember writing some thing like this for CairoPlot. I don't think the patch was excepted. If graphs involve programmers power of 2 numbers are also good numbers to use not only 0 and 5. Some questions that the algorithm does not answer what is a good number of ticks to put on a segment of X pixels? Also i am sure having phi some place in there would make it more pleasing. Has any one else though at length on the problem?

I had a go at something similar a while back for making numbers look 'nicer'. It's useful for when you have code that calculates a number, but you want to make it more marketing friendly.

http://github.com/dhotson/fudge

For easy reference, this article points to the book, Graphics Gems (Hardcover) by Andrew S. Glassner (Editor) 1990. There are no Amazon reviews for it at http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/012... .