Found another article that talks about how to learn faster and "better." Good article. You may be surprised at how many of these things you do already.

http://oedb.org/library/college-basics/hacking-knowledge

How many times have you written your own parser for some application? It is ridiculous. Every time you get there and realize that "hey... now I have to deal with escaped commas or some other delimiter." Anyway enough of that for the .Net environment -- best to use Marcos FileHelpers.

http://www.filehelpers.com/

There is an open source web template project. Has lots to look at and many are CSS XHTML compliant (no more table based layouts).

http://www.oswd.org/designs/favorites/