There are a few things to consider when talking about French Algeria and its development, and I'm going to focus on three - geography, ideology, and demographics. This is not exhaustive - there are numerous other factors influencing the development of French Algeria and the relationship between the colony and the metropole, but I feel that these give a fair overview of some of the major factors.

Firstly, geography - Algeria, compared to other French colonies at the time (the French Caribbean, French India, and French Guyana) as well as the colonies that would follow (Madagascar, French Indochina, French West and Central Africa, and French South Pacific) is considerably closer, being just across the Mediterranean. This served a few purposes. Firstly, the colony was more easily managed, as military forces could be more easily transported to and from the Metropole - indeed, the French Foreign Legion maintained a large presence in Algeria and considered it to be a sort of home base. This proximity also allowed for a greater sort of military occupation to be possible - as materiel could be transported across the Mediterranean more effectively than across the Atlantic, the French armies in Northern Africa were able to engage in long-term campaigns against local polities (such as that of Abd el-Kader) and potentially rebellious native communities, allowing for a greater level of centralization of the colony. It bears to be said that this centralization carried a heavy cost for the natives - there are accounts of French troops suffocating villages of Algerian natives by forcing them into caves and lighting fires outside to burn out the oxygen. On a governmental level, this military occupation (especially early in the colonial history) was profitable for the French and the emerging European settler colonial class (Pied-Noirs) in terms of agricultural output and labor, but, again, devastating economically for the Algerians themselves due to changes in land ownership laws and a generally indifferent colonial administration. This allowed for transitioning many areas into plantations and French-style cities, codifying implicitly French cultural and social domination along with the military. Transportation of resources was also considerably easier - labor was brought from Algeria into France throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries and the French engaged in massive construction projects throughout Northern Algeria, especially under the reign of Napoleon III. Lastly, just to touch upon it, the position of Algeria's northern coast upon the Mediterranean, as well as laws granting European settlers farmland and relative liberties for white "Algerians" (here differentiated from the Berber and Arab natives) led to a fairly large population of European settler colonists, the aforementioned Pied-Noirs. This population eventually became largely urban and had a mutually beneficial relationship with the French state - they helped to maintain French control over the natives while profiting from French policies regarding education, land ownership, and citizenship rights.

With regards to ideology, Algeria was colonized during a period of emerging conceptions of French Liberalism. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a series of letters on Algeria that depict the French goals for Algeria at various points in its early colonial history - initially, France saw this land as a chance to prove its ideals of human equality, that any person brought up with French civilization could achieve equality and become French. This idea would be played with over the course of the following century and a half, occasionally being abandoned as the French would shift colonial policy, but would eventually culminate in Algeria becoming a (nearly) full department of France, with most of the rights associated with this. Indeed, de Tocqueville points to a view of French imperialism that supports the rhetoric of the "mission civilisatrice," wherein the French held that proper education and exposure to "proper" civilization would allow any people to become French. This included re-planning cities in the French style and redesigning homes to abandon former traditional styles, as well as policies of forced deveiling or Algerian Muslim women (part of an overall system of colonial justification that Spivak has referred to as "white men saving brown women from brown men," which is to say that this policy was based on racist and sexist conceptions of civilization). Again, I bring this up partly to reinforce the idea that this development that Algeria received was not without cost, frequently violating the rights and, quite literally, the bodies of the colonized.

The last element I'll touch upon is demographics. As I've mentioned before, the Pied-Noirs maintained a large (at its height, approximately 30% of Northern Algeria) population, making Algeria more of a settler colony than the other contemporary French colonies. As such, additional resources were pushed into the colony to develop churches, town squares, expand boulevards, and quite literally remake the image of France in North Africa. Schools were also established for Pied-Noirs, though these schools frequently barred admission for Arabs and Berbers.

I hope that I've managed to touch upon some of the reasons for Algerian development. Again, this is in no way an exhaustive list of reasons, but meant to touch upon some of the large reasons why French colonial legacies still have an impact upon Algeria today. I also hope that it's clear that this development was frequently one-sided - while the French did provide resources to the colony, it in return gave back a considerable amount to the metropole and often suffered considerably under French rule. I have sources, but don't currently have access to them - I'll edit this comment to add them in shortly.

EDIT: It's taken me a bit to get to this because my computer has been in the shop, but here are the sources that I used.

Writings on Empire and Slavery by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts; notably, the Essays on Algeria - this gives insight into the way that French liberal ideology understood the French civilizing mission and the relation between France and its colony.

A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon, as well as Camus' The First Man both give a look at later French ideology and its impact upon the colony - Fanon notably works with the Algerian resistance (FLN) while Camus, being a Pied-Noir, has a left-wing white settler view, but they do discuss French colonial ideology to a fairly large degree.

Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present by Charles-Robert Ageron is a good introductory work on Franco-Algerian history, touching upon many of the important themes in Algeria's colonial history, with a heavy focus on the impact that colonization had upon the native peoples, as well as the politics of labor. That said, it is a survey work and doesn't dive into incredible depth on the Revolution, the conquest, or policies of development, but it does touch upon them and provides a good starting point for further reading.