Cygwin, Libxml/libxslt, Secret Workhorses, ...
I don't know why, but the IT press has not been eager to report on certain Free Software packages.
Granted, gone are the days when the IT press won't even acknowledge the existance of GCC in their compiler comparisons. However, there are still powerful software packages that elude mention by the press.
Cygwin is a wonderful distribution of a POSIX library for Windows and a whole lot of free software based on it. Among them the GCC compiler (C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran 77), the GNU tools (bash, awk, sed, bison, etc.), scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Guile), Typesetting systems (TeX, groff, DocBook), Editors (vim, Emacs, pico), Network servers (telnet, ftp, ssh), XFree86 server and clients, PostgreSQL server, a Windows SDK (creating DLLs), Internet software (Pine, lynx, wget, curl), and a lot more. I know a lot of people who use Cygwin in their daily work. But you can't find a book on Cygwin, not even O'Reilly has a title about it.
Two packages I take particular delight in using that comes with Cygwin are the libxml and libxslt libraries. These libraries are originally developed for the GNOME project, but have since been ported to many platforms, including the Cygwin platform. They offer the command line tool xmllint that parses and validates XML files agains DTDs, and xsltproc that applies XSLT stylesheets to XML files. Being native executables, they don't suffer from the startup delays typical for Java based parsers and transformers. They are also faster and consumes less memory. But you can't find a book on libxml and libxslt, not even O'Reilly has a title about them.
Why?