[KineticLensman]

> I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow"

Yes. In the early 1990s I relied on Usenet's comp.lang hierarchy and the awesome FAQs that accreted there. A thorough reading of these could head off a huge number of problems before they manifested as bugs. Here are some examples [0, 1] to give people the flavour, admittedly from about 10 years after I had moved on.

[0] http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C++-faq/part1/ [1] http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C++-faq/part5/