Do you use your brain or Google to solve your problems?
gtani: There's a macro question of how to use all resources at your dispoal to address coding questions: maybe look at pragmatics' wetware book.the micro skill you have to develop: scour delicious, IRC, stackoverflow, Yahoo search, forums for your language/framework.  Also krugle, koders.com, gotapi.com, (can't tell if anybody's maintain codase.com for java/C++)Google custom search engines are great, too, carefully choose 20-40 domains to include.