And yet I was pleasantly surprised. I'm quite used to finding "advanced" articles on various programmic topics and finding that everything said in them is so basic that I can't learn even the smallest piece of information from it.

This one still had some quite interesting pieces of information that I hadn't heard of or hadn't studied in detail yet.

not for full-time programmers, but SM's audience seems to be more designers who may dip into code now and again

Welcome to Smashing Magzine.