General advice:

- Don't be afraid to throw money at problems as they arise, for example, when identifying the proper brand of diaper or bottles. Expect you'll be buying one of each until you find one that doesn't leak, etc.

- But don't spend big bucks on things with limited lifetimes. You can spend an unbounded amount of money on a fancy crib and other such things. Ikea stuff does the job, it's cheap, and you won't feel bad ditching it later on.

- New babies are like crack to some people. They need to get their "hit" by looking at your kid. This is, at the least, a feature when recruiting relatives to be babysitters.

- Get out! It's pretty hard in the beginning to imagine going out for a proper date night, no kid. You have to do it. It's essential to your sanity.

Specific useful products:

- High-quality pacifiers: Wubbanub, which have the benefit that, once the kid gets some motor control, the kid can pick up and put back in.

- Don't buy a "diaper bag." Waste of money. Get a messenger bag (e.g., from Timbuk2). These tend to have rubberized interiors (good for hosing out when things get stanky), and they can be repurposed later on when they're no longer carrying diapers.

- Get a red bulb for a lamp you keep for those late-night feedings / diaper changes. Red light doesn't blow away your eyes' dark adaptation.

- There are all kinds of high-tech diaper trash cans. For #1 diapers, they work. For #2 diapers, expect to take more extreme measures (e.g., repurposing old plastic shopping bags to tie up soiled diapers).

- Don't be wooed by the "Baby Einstein" industry. What makes your kid smart is face time with you, not getting sucked into eye candy on TV. However, despite the pediatricians recommendation of zero TV before age 2, there are times that you really, really need 30 minutes to get something done. Baby Einstein videos can turn your lovely darling into a drooling zombie for those essential 30 minutes. Use sparingly.

- A camera to live in the diaper bag. Doesn't have to be the top of the line, although water-resistance is probably a plus.

- A kick-ass camera that you'd never let anywhere near the diaper bag. Remember, "it's for the baby."

- Car seats, in the beginning, are rear-facing. You can get a cheap mirror that mounts on the back-seat headrest that you can see through your own rear-view mirror. Very useful so you can assuage your guilt at not being able to see if your baby is okay.

- There are two schools of thought on car seats. Lots of people are sucked in by the "docking station" car seats. They make it easy to extract your kid from the car without waking him/her up. They're also very heavy and your kid outgrows them sooner than you'd think. We decided to focus on lightweight everything and use a car seat that mounts permanently. This worked well. (If you have two cars with back seats, you should also suck it up and get one car seat for each one.)

- Cool trick: your kid's bed is going to require sheets to be changed, sometimes multiple times in the night. You can lay down multiple layers of sheets (with "waterproof" barriers between), so changing the bed is just a matter of peeling off one layer.

- You can get these fabric padded contraptions for restaurant high-chairs and supermarket shopping carts. There are times when the only high-chair you've got access to have slime on them from the previous kid...