Everytime I sit down to "do a little research" on a subject, I am NEVER disappointed in the wealth of information I can find online. How did I EVER get anything done before the internet? There's always video, free information, quite possibly a free piece of software that will perform the acts of majick I'm looking for or if you prefer, there's always someone willing to sell it as well. I use to think "you get what you pay for" applied to software and information, that is no longer the case. There are some incredibly talented benevolent creatures on this planet. They toll their little butts off and then just hand it over to the public, imagine that!! Luckily there's karma to take care of them :) You can also make a donation on their website or at least be sure to give credit where credit's due!! Some of my recent discoveries are:
Bootstrap from Twitter: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html - Web building
jQuery: http://jquery.com/ - Scripting made (somewhat) easy
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/ - this is free equivalent version of Microsoft Office
GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/ - image manipulation program
Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - similar to Illustrator or CorelDraw
SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/ - tons of open source software to browse
Happy Surfing :)