Given the prolonged wait to get my N900 in hand, (due to obvious now infamous delays from Nokia ), I will like to upgrade my knowledge to be prepared to fully njoy the potential of N900. Am looking for guidance essentially regarding
- What all OS/language i need to know if i need write a custom application/widget
- where can i find the requisite knowledge/resources
- How to communicate with the various hardware components on offer
- what all testing resources available for maemo development on windows environment

Any guidance in this matter will be greatly appreciated.

There have been recently a number of posts on similar topics e.g.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32988

Most of the documentation you can find in the development section.
http://maemo.org/development/

Hope that helps to get you started.

I strongly suggest Forum Nokia.

Thanks for the useful posts, but is there a way to develop for Maemo on Windows platform?

It seems Nathan already shared a VPC image for the interested folks to be used on Widows environment. Thanks a ton Nathan, great job!

Forgot the link, you can find the VPC image at http://maemo.org/downloads/product/PC/vpc-sdk/

n900freak it's not a "must" but if you really want to understand your n900 you should install GNU/Linux (native,wubi or vm). You can start with a "easy" distro as ubuntu or one of its flavours(kubuntu,xubuntu) , fedora or OpenSuse

I suggest also to learn python, as it's the most easy and powerful language that is enough for scripting and writing small apps.

so how does python fair for advanced development like games/widgets?

Pretty good. General Python caveats apply, but as long as you don't try to write things like Need for Speed, you should be OK.

I second python. It is quite quick and easy to write extensions in C for it. So the more time critical code can be writen and compiled.