Anytime you find yourself wishing that IDA could perform some task, you should take a moment to wonder whether anyone else may have had the same wish and, further, whether someone has done something about implementing the missing functionality. Many IDA plug-ins are the result of exactly this kind of effort. The vast majority of publicly available plug-ins are short and sweet and designed to solve a specific problem. In addition to serving as potential solutions for your reverse engineering problems, plug-ins for which source code is available can serve as valuable references for interesting uses of the IDA SDK.