So, you've started playing World of Warcraft ((WoW) and have heard of these thing's called add on's or mods. Add on's are small program's written by independent players to help enhance game play, by allowing more flexibillity and actions than the game alone. The following is a list and short description of the addon's that I must have for any and all characters.
The first is a hands down necessity. It's actually two addon's that work together. Questhelper and TomTom. Questhelper places icons on your map for the areas you need to go to complete the tasks set to you by a quest giver. It also gives you suggested routes from area to area to most quickly accomplish several tasks in your log. Having this will greatly speed you along gaining experience points to achieve higher levels. TomTom is a coordinate system that helps with the mapping of these locations as well as providing a movable directional arrow for the direction of the selected task. It also helps to communicate locations to other players who use a coordinate system.
The second is one I must have for bag and bank maintainence. As you quest, your bag's and backpack will fill up with various items, from junk items and suppllies, to epic treasure finds. Oglow is an addon that allows you to quickly search for items by not having to mouse over some based on a color coded system. WoW has several quality levels of items; poor, common, uncommon, rare and epic. Oglow assigns a color and outlines the item if it is of uncommon level or above. Using this allows me to rapidly sell junk (poor) items or see how many magical treasures I have in my bags, without it i would have to mouse over each item and wait a second or two for the tooltip to pop up. When you get to a level of having a coupla hundered slots, this can be quite time consuming.
Third is BankItems, this addon allow's you to search your character's (or all of them, if you have multiple) inventory, to include your bags, equiped items, mailbox, bank, and guildbank. I personally have several characters, that all have different roles and proffesions. When I need an item to craft/enchant/quest something it is very nice just to be able to pull up this addon type in what I'm looking for and get a list of how many, which character and where it's stored, the item/s may be. Again saving me much time of running my character around (to the mailbox, to my bank) and doing the same for multiple characters.
Auctioneer is my forth must have addon. By scanning the auction house of your realm server, (recomended daily, but every few days will work), you are able to get a baseline of what items are worth on the open market of inter-player trade. This helps you decide what to sell and for how much in your gold making prospects, because just receiving the rewards from questing and selling items to NPC (non-player character) vendors will leave you short of the cash you will find yourself needing. It also allows you to recognize good buys (perhaps for resale at a mark-up) and items that are grossly overpriced (”What's this guy thinking?!?!”) Auctioneer also has a feature that makes posting your own auctions easier. This includes multiple listings of an item in a few short clicks (stand alone AH only allows you to post 1 item at a time), a suggested price (based on your scan's, the more scan's, the more accurate your view of the market) and any easy undercut option (list this for just under the lowest guy's price!)
The last must have addon is AtlasLoot. This addon allows you to quickly look up gear drops from instance boss's, reputation rewards, and crafting proffesions. I find this very helpful when people are looking for groups to tackle an instance. I can lookk up and see what the potential rewards may be for my character. If I have no gains from that instance, there is no reason for me to go through it, and if it does it allows me to know which instances I want to try to run. I can also search to see what different proffesions can craft if I want to get myself a gear upgrade in that manner as well as browse the reputation rewards of the different factions to know which ones are most important for me to work my reputation with.
These are the general addon's I use for each character. There are class specific addon's that you may decide are a must have too. I download most of my addons from CurseGaming.com as it is a well organized website. Many addon's can be automatically updated using their gaming client program, although I choose to do this manually. So grab these addon's and see how much easier your character maintainence, gold making and questing become! Good Luck!