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