On Mon, Sep 13, 1999 at 06:41:15PM -0500, rich wrote: > Howdy everyone, > > I was wondering: what are the tools available in Debian that one would > consider part of the "standard" toolbox of a programmer?
Well, it all depends on the programmer, I suppose. :) You need a good text editor. For me, that is vim. (As another debian-user reader pointed out, "You can take my Vim when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." Same goes for me, but it might be more difficult. :) For others, that might be elvis or emacs or whatever else. In any case, you need a good one, one that you know well. You should have the compiler for whatever language you want to play in. For java, you need the jdk. (I think I have all four jdk* packages installed on my system..) For C, you need gcc. One thing that I dabbled with over the summer is makefiles -- wonderfully amazing things. With the right Makefile you can type :make in vim and it will rebuild your source, and jump to the first line with errors, and let you step through all the lines with errors. I am sure emacs offers the same setup. If you want to do much C programming, and you have X window installed, then check out ddd -- a GUI frontend to gdb (very much nicer to a newbie such as myself) as well as some other debuggers (rumored to also include the java debugger, though I haven't tested that.) If you want to do Perl programming, well, your Debian system should have come with that preinstalled. If you don't know perl, then buy one of two books: Learning Perl, by Randal L Swartz (I hope I got that right) or Programming Perl, by Tom Christianson and Larry Wall. Which one you buy depends on your programming experience. At some point you *will* want Programming Perl, so you might as well buy that one, and if it goes over your head (like it did mine my first trip through it) grab Learning Perl, and then try again. :) as for other bits of the toolbox, you need to use manpages, (perldoc has perl info, the C ones are harder to find; I don't think there is one manpage that lists all the other C-based manpages..) grep, find, and maybe other bits too. :) -- Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/ Hate spam? See http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ for help Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me spread!