Links

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CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

CSS Zen Garden - A great site to see what can be accomplished with CSS

PHP - Open Source Scripting Language

PHP.net - The official home of PHP

MySQL - Open Source Database

MySQL.com - The official home of MySQL

Browsers

Firefox - BestWebTutorials.com highly recommends that users download and use Firefox.  One of the great advantages of Firefox is TONS of add-ons for everything from blocking ads (but not on this site! please!) to web developer tools to social networking tools to...

Google Chrome - A relative newcomer to the browser wars.  Chrome has a minimal interface, but runs very fast.

Safari - Safari is a browser for both Mac and PC.  It has that cool apple look and runs great.

It should come as no surprise that we don't provide a link to download Internet Exploder.  Please help send a message to Microsoft that they don't own the internet - use a different browser!

Email Client

Thunderbird - A great email client from the same people who brought us Firefox.  It has a nice clean interface and best of all - it's not Outlook!

Word Processing - Office Suite

Open Office - Open office is an open-source productivity suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, database, presentation software and a drawing program.  It's features are similar to Microsoft Office, but the price tag is a little easier to swallow - it's FREE!

Graphics/Photo Editors

Paint.net - Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows.  Definitely more powerful than the Paint program that came with your machine, but not so powerful that you can't figure out how to do anything!  A good tool for "light" editing tasks.

Gimp - Gimp is an open-source photo editor with some serious power.  An incredible array of features that will do just about anything.  This is not a program to crop a couple of photos, but if you need serious graphics generating/editing capabilities you might want to check this out.

Web Developer Tools

Notepad++ - It sounds kind of stupid that anything with the word Notepad in it could be considered a web development tool.  Don't be fooled.  This is a great editor.  Two of the features we enjoy are Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding, and there are a ton of supported languages. And it's free.  And it has built in FTP.  This is definitely a recommended download.

Kompozer - So you were thinking about upgrading to a WYSIWYG web page editor, but when you saw the price of Dreamweaver you decided that coding by hand wasn't so bad after all?  Kompozer is a nice intermediate step.  It doesn't have all the features you might be looking for, but, let's face it, it's free.

Miscellaneous Links

Free Icon Editor - A web based tool for creating favicon.ico files. Not very fancy, but very easy.

Audacity - Audacity is an open-source sound recorder and editor.  Definitely more powerful that Sound Recorder that came with your Windows machine!  It can be a little intimidating for first time users, but it has some powerful features.

PeaZip - PeaZip is an open-source file and archive manager.  Great features, easy to use.

Cobian Backup - Cobian has an open-source version that is a great manager for your backups.  Let's you schedule backups for selected files and directories.  Easy restore, too.  Just the tool you need with that new external USB drive.

OpenSourceWindows.org - A great list of free and open-source software for Windows.

OpenSourceWindows.com - Another great list of free and open-source software for Windows and Mac.

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