SCons, for sure, is the way to go. I use Emacs/c-scope as my editing environment, and keep a browser and terminal (man pages) open for API reference (dinkumwar

SCons, for sure, is the way to go. I use Emacs/c-scope as my editing environment, and keep a browser and terminal (man pages) open for API reference (dinkumware.com is a good one. They have full C99 an stdc++ library documentation) Definitely make sure you're not coding something that's already been done in boost. The boost libraries (most of them) are very nice. If you're using one of the latest versions of GCC, then you can use some TR1 stuff (although I think boost has a more complete TR1 implementation (http://boost.org/doc/html/boost_tr1.html http://boost.org/doc/html/boost_tr1.html) Also, I don't know about most folks, but I also keep an IRC client open connected to #<whatever language> and a pastebin (http://pastebin.com/ http://pastebin.com/) tab open to discuss code with people when I don't have anyone else to work with.