Quoting terryc (terryc@???):

> 1. What do people recommend as online sources for Bind configuration
> these days.

Online book _DNS for Rocket Scientists_,
http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/.

> 2. what programs do you recommend for checking the configuration files.

named-checkconf . It comes with BIND9, but many admins are unaware of
it and its essential nature -- that being where the otherwise woefully
lacking linting routines are.

At my former place of work, after I started including this preflight
check in all change control requests, my colleagues dubbed it 'the Rick
Test' and it became a local standard -- rather flattering, really.

/usr/sbin/named-checkconf -z -t /var/named/chroot/ /etc/named.conf | \
egrep -v '(loaded serial|all zones must be in views)'

The -z option causes the utility to syntax-check all referenced
zonefiles in addition to conffiles. And you can skip the '-t
/var/named/chroot/' bit if you aren't running BIND9 in a chroot.

I would discourage new installations of BIND9, as it's a slow,
RAM-grabbing, overfeatured, monolithic daemon binary, and you can do
better. If this is for authoritative-only service, look no further than
NSD, a relatively easy migration because it uses directly re-use RFC
1035 ("BIND") zonefiles (which it compiles to binary format for speed).

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Network_Other/dns-servers.html#nsd