I have listed quite a few good tools above, now it's time to pick a set of tools for ourselves before we continue further. Having the right development environment from the start is much easier than trying to change half-way through development.
The rest of the examples in this book will be based mainly around my own environment, but all of them will be achievable regardless of the environment you choose.
The only exception to this is Firefox and Firebug. I cannot emphasis enough how important this one tool will be to the development of a site, and as of the time of writing there is no other tool that can achieve quite the same results as it can as easily.
Demonstration environment:
PC Operating System: Macintosh OSX
File Transfer / FTP Client: Coda + Transmit
Program Code Editor / IDE: Coda
Image Editor: Adobe Fireworks
Primary Web Browser: Firefox + Firebug + Web Developer Toolbar
Database Management: phpMyAdmin + EasySQL
Source Code / SVN Repository: Unfuddle.com
Source...