Here at WalletPop, we're always trying to give tips on car buying. I offered some advice about how to avoid getting sucked in here, and warned about the dangers of 0% financing here. Now CNNMoney has a great list of 6 things you should never say to a car dealer: never admit to being in love with a car, never say you need a car urgently, never negotiate based on monthly payments, don't hand him the keys to your potential trade-in, don't admit you know nothing about leasing, and don't talk about your credit problem.

This is all great advice, but here's the thing: car dealers spend their lives coming up with ways to sell the most cars for the most possible. If you're looking to buy a car, there's a good chance that you've read only a couple magazine pieces, if that, about how to avoid getting taken. Car dealers are like a mutating virus: find out one way to beat them and they'll come up with others, and they have all the time in the world to dream them up.

My advice: try to do the bulk of your shopping online, and only visit the lot to test-drive a specific car that you've called about -- and make it clear that you don't want to try something else. If they had something else you wanted, it would have shown up in your online search, right? I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me but I think that your odds of overspending on a car increase if you start test-driving stuff that the dealer -- who doesn't know your budget and wants to make as much money as possible -- suggests.

Buying a car is a pretty daunting experience for most people. When you combine the size of the purchase with the less than stellar reputation of the car selling industry, many of us break out in a cold sweat at the idea of visiting a car lot.

Doing some research into the industry as I prepare to buy a car, I found some great resources:

A former used car salesman offered readers of Consumerist 3 great tips for buying a car: do your car shopping in December when car dealers are desperate for business, bring your own financing from your own bank, and watch out for an unseemly tactic known as "the squeeze."

Browsing through the "automotive" section of my local newspaper the other day, I saw a big ad for a dealership offering "0% Financing!" on all new cars -- with an asterisk. Of course, there was an asterisk with the usual boilerplate about "credit approval required" but there was also something more interesting: a disclosure that the 0% financing deal was "in lieu of manufacturer's rebate."

Now hold on. If you have to forgo a $4 thousand rebate in order to get "0% financing", that's not 0% financing! That's $4 thousand dollar financing.

And then of course, there's the whole issue of buying a new car and the myth of 0% financing in general. As Dave Ramsey wrote in Total Money Makeover:

Myth: You can get a good deal on a new car at 0 percent interest.

Truth: A new car loses 60% of its value in the first four year; that isn't 0%.

Be extremely wary of bold-faced gimmicks in size-64 fonts followed by 5 exclamation points. For more tips on how to avoid getting taken to the cleaners next time you buy a car, check out this video.