There are a few ways to get round the lack of CD drive.
1) assuming you have another computer and they will both share an internet connection then they are already networked together, share the CD drive on your other computer and mount it as a network drive on the netbook.
2) get a USB memory stick, copy the contents of any CD you want to install onto the stick and install from that.
3) for the occasional bit of software that really insists on being installed from a CD, create an image of the CD (an ISO) and use something like daemon tools to mount the image as a virtual CD drive
The only time that not having a CD drive really becomes in issue is if you want to reinstall windows, but that can be overcome too.