new MacBook user...questions

I just got a MacBook on Sunday to replace, for the most part, the iMac I've been using for the past 2 years. I have a couple of questions...

1 - in moving my stuff from my iMac to my MacBook, I've been moving various things to my external harddrive and then loading onto my MacBook. will this work for programs I've downloaded over the years or do I have to go back and find all those programs and download them again onto my MacBook?

EDIT - I think I've found what I need with respect to my second question.

thanks! I'm sure I'll have more questions in the coming days.

You should be able to just drag them onto the external hard disk, then drag them back off onto the new machine.

If you get a firewire cable, you can set your old mac to 'target disk mode' and use either manual file copies or the migration wizard to copy directly as if the imac was an external hard disk.

^^^
awesome. thank you.

I used the Setup Assistant when moving from my eMac to my MacBook and it transferred *everything* flawlessly. 20 minutes after I unpacked it my MacBook was set up exactly like my eMac was. Definitely the best way to move across Macs.