Perhaps the most powerful programming information resource is Google Groups, which was formerly known as DejaNews or just Deja. Google archives and indexes the Usenet newsgroups so that you can search for the answer to almost any kind of programming question you might have. I cannot count how many times I have found the answer to even the most arcane software development question. The archive goes all the way back to 1981! By the way, this is also a very powerful site for non-programming questions. This is a two way street. If you know the answer to a question someone else has posted, please post an answer.

We take traffic lights completely for granted not really ever acknowledging the safety, sanity and order they provide. Then again, it is a sign of their excellent design and reliability that we don't notice them any more than we need to. A source control system should be like that, and the great folks at the Subversion project have created such a tool. I have used Subversion for over two years, it is solid, and the people behind it truly care about their product.

Inno Setup is a free installer for Windows programs. First introduced in 1997 by Jordan Russell, Inno Setup today rivals and even surpasses many commercial installers in feature set and stability and has been downloaded by nearly 1 million people. For my needs I found commercial installers such as InstallShield daunting in both cost and complexity. Inno Setup is fast and easy to learn and is a truly high quality freeware tool.

There is no better tool for creating source code documentation. More than just a comment extraction tool, doxygen produces annotated formatted and colorized source code listings and class relationship diagrams. This is a serious tool for producing real developer documentation.

CodeGuru is a great code snippet and discussion resource for Visual C++/MFC, Visual Basic and C# programmers.

Free C++, C# and .NET articles, code snippets, discussions, news and a great bunch of developers.

Software developers consume technical books almost as much as they consume caffeine. Feeding the book habit gets expensive but this site helps save you some serious money on technical (and non-technical) books. Enter a book title, ISBN, etc., and you will get a list of online vendors organized by price.

If you have ever encountered a file with an extension you have never before seen, visit this site and you will get chapter and verse on it. I would go so far as to say that if the extension is not listed on this site, delete the file, it's probably a virus :-)

Ever wonder what the exact spec is for a URL (RFC 2396) or what a MIME type is (RFC 2045). The answer to these questions is the "Request for Comment". There are literally thousands of these definitive documents covering a wide range of networking topics. Not only are these documents highly relevant to today's Internet but they form an historical log of the development of the Internet.