- Photo Editing: GIMP- Photo Viewing: IrfanView- Sound Editing/Recording: Audacity If there's a free program I haven't listed that you feel is essential to have in your programming repertoire, please email me at dan@digitseven.com and I'll add it to the list.
- List of Semantics- List of Shader Data Types
- Dot Product- Matrices- Vectors
- CGTextures - A huge selection of textures.- The Freesound Project - Great resource for sound clips. All kinds here: animal, nature, industrial, etc.
- Wikipedia entry for Optics- Wikipedia entry for Diffuse Reflection
- Best Article for Perlin Noise. Lots of explanation, code examples, applications and more.- Wikipedia entry for Perlin noise
- Wikipedia entry for Quad Tree
- UK Telegraph Article on Starling Formations- XNA Creator's Club 2D Flocking Simulator - I suggest checking out their other links under Education->Utilities. They have some pretty interesting stuff to help you along and develop some powerful games/simulations.- There was an article in the July 2007 National Geographic which I also gathered information from. Unfortunately, I cannot find an online source for that.
- XNA Forums- BasicEffect Class