Learning how to program in linux

Question

I am familiar with several languages and have experience in using Visual Studio, Eclipse, and xcode. I have really only learned programming and debugging from development environment. Whenever I see discussions about Windows vs Linux for development or Emacs vs visual studio, someone always something like "in Linux my entire OS is a development environment." In fact I constantly hear all sorts of things about Linux being an ideal development environment. But where by pray tell can I learn the magic of developing on Linux? Every tutorial I see involves an IDE like code::blocks or something.

I'm not asking the best OS for development. I'm simply asking, as someone who only knows how to develop on Windows, how do I learn to develop on Linux? I hear random things like grep, valgrind, objdump, etc., but I don't know how to use these tools in my development process.

Does anyone know of a good resource? I have Googled and Googled, but I cannot find any sort of Windows to Linux developer guide.

Answer 1

Heart of Gnu/Linux is shell. There are lot of IDE tools and similar like there are on Win, however if you don't know to use shell, you will miss a lot of possibility and real power behind Gnu/Linux OS.

As a starting point look at this link

http://devmanual.gentoo.org/tools-reference/index.html

However again where you should go from there depends a lot of what you actually want to do and program. My suggestion is learn to use Emacs. In my opinion it is the best "editor/tool" there is, what ever cross your mind you can do it with Emacs.

Also read if you can some book which will explain Gnu/Linux system to you, organization, what is what etc..... Advanced programing in Unix is good book, and is same for Gnu/Linux, but I am not sure if you can get hold of it. Also if you are not good with C lot of will not be helpful to you.

Answer 2

Linux is primarily written in C, with a little bit of Assembly. You could write an application using only the C programming language.

You can write Bash scripts using command line tools provided in most Linux distros such as getopt, grep ect..

You could write an applications in Python which runs on command line. The Yum package manager is written in Python.

All depends on what you would like to do.