As promised, here are some useful links for aspiring game developers to keep track of:

www.gamasutra.com
Very useful sight, frequent updates, indepth examinations of business and technical sides of game development. make sure to read some of the postmortems..

Most of the material is also packaged in the "GAME DEVELOPER" magazine, if you can afford it, there are 2 cd's containing searchable PDF files of every game developer magazine in their entirety... very much worth it.

pc.ign.com

www.gameindustry.biz
Good business and industry news, with a slight slant to the UK

www.avault.com
Good independant source of editorials and game reviews

www.pcgr.com

Always good to see reader's opinions...

www.pythonware.com
www.python.org
Please please check out Python for all your scripting needs!

www.freesoftware.com
www.gnu.org
Places to find good free GNU source code, in particular check out GDBM...

Here are some advanced C++/C books I would recommend:

The BEST Python Book:
"Programming Python", Mark Lutz.