Re: what are the "standard" programming tools available in Debian?

[rich <rehartma@artsci.wustl.edu>]

Thanks Seth! It seems lately that many questions go unanswered, much
less answered in such a thorough manner... I'm sure that your advice
will help me...
 
> > 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.
> 
> :)