mirror, mirror on the wall ... what (toolsets) makes the prettiest interface of all ?

[eluser]Nick Husher[/eluser]
I highly recommend Javascript, The Definitive Guide by O'Reilly. It's an amazing introduction to the language, fully explains its quirks and differences from classical object-oriented languages. There's also Javascript, The Good Parts that explains best-practices for writing larger javascript apps.

Generally, whatever JS library you bother using, CI will be fine with it. The big thing that you have to work around is CI's lack of out-of-the-box support for query strings. Certain kinds of asynchronous scripts will want to make use of GET parameters by default, which you'll have to factor in and switch them over to POST.

For professional design tools, if you're on a really tight budget, GIMP for Windows or Linux is a great option. If you're running OS X, things are a little less good: GIMP for OS X is total ass, Seashore is really limited, and Photoshop is the 800lb gorilla in the room. When I was in college and fresh out, my design toolchain was GIMP, Wings 3d, YAFRAY and a really ancient version of Illustrator (Illustrator 6?) and an old copy of Corel Painter.

Also, my time is billed at between $120 and $200 an hour by my company, and we're operating out of central Vermont. I see embarassingly little of that money in practice, as it goes toward overhead: management, server maintenence costs, taxes, rent, power, that kind of thing. And I'm a relatively junior member of our team. As a freelancer, I probably couldn't bill that due to relative inexperience, but $100/hr for certain sets of skills and experience isn't unheard-of. Our office has a license for Adobe CS3 that we all operate on: I'm the only designer, so I'm the only person really using it.