I just thought I’d drop some useful links and tools your way for those beginning and non-tool-cist peoples:

http://getfirebug.com/ used for js/css/dom debugging – additionally, even Yahoo is building upon this. I’ve used this a lot for AJAX request debugging as well.

http://zend.com/pdt Zend eclipse project – get the full package – this is a ton of PHP tools from Zend (the PHP company) built on top of Eclipse (for those Java tool lovers out there)

Aptana useful for css/javascript editing in eclipse – or as a standalone

Mysql Gui Tools a nice gui browser for mysql – I know I know – us diehards – we shouldn’t need this – but it is still nice (you can also get plugins for eclipse to do the same thing with jdbc)

Pietty + Putty Pietty – a putty plugin – allows for true transparency of putty windows – amazingly cool – at first its in some oriental language – and when you first open it up – you can’t read the screen when you first ssh somewhere. Never fear: just goto the encoding menu option and choose utf-8 – otherwise works like a dream. SSH to your heart’s content.

Komodo If you don’t like Eclipse or the long time it takes to load, you can use Komodo. Plus, version 4 brings some lovely things to the table. Thats right, Lovely (and thats not cuz they gave me a shirt either…)

PHPDoc Phpdoc for windows – has a nice gui for using phpdoc – what we use for documentation because its easy to customize and launch. (I have been using an eclipse tool though lately that I wrote….)

Thats about it – if you know any other cool tools, post them in the comments!