Assume I need to solve an NP-complete problem, for which problem-specific methods (e.g. efficient heuristics or exponential algorithms faster than naive one) are not well developed. If the size of input is n, then, in theory, I could reduce the problem to SAT of size P(n), where P is some polynomial, and use SAT solvers. Or I could reduce it to other NP-complete problem with well-developed algorithms available.
Of course, I would like to use reduction with P(n) being polynomial with as low degree as possible.
1) Is there a (reasonably recent) book/survey/webpage in which I can learn what are the most efficient known reductions from some (as many as possible) NP-complete problems to (say) SAT?
2) I am sure many such reductions has already been implemented, some of them open source. Is there a webpage collecting links to such implementations?