Shovel

Shovels are auxiliary tools used to ease the process of collecting dirt, sand, gravel, clay and snow (as opposed to using bare hands). Shovels are not required to remove aforementioned blocks, although snowballs can only be obtained by shoveling snow and some block types will only drop items if a shovel was used upon it.

For information on what certain blocks can drop when using a shovel see that block's article.

Crafting
Shovels are created on a 3x3 crafting square with 2 sticks and 1 unit of a tool material:

Performance
The following table summarizes the speed at which different quality shovels perform on different block types. Since the Beta 1.2 update, wood and stone tools have increased durability, meaning that wood tools have 64 uses, and stone tools having 128.