Programming

Hello, I am a basic programer from back in the 80's/90's. I moved on to visual basic and now I want to learn C. I want to eventually program in Linux.

Now, before I get on this band wagon I want to ask a few questions to make sure I am getting started out right.

1. Is C a good language to learn? I don't want to learn it if it is dwindling to nothing-ness amoung new programmers.

2. Once I get half way decent in C, is there a visual c package out there to make a lot of the coding easier?

3. Is there a development environment that will allow me to test my apps without crashing Linux? (Just want to be sure)

4. How big are the difference between programming C in windows and C in linux?

Thank you much in advance,

Eric

1. Yes. Almost the entire Linux kernel is written in C (with some ASM). Thats not going away any time soon. There are literally thousands of other open-source projects out there using C. Great resource to learn from.

2. Maybe someone else can answer this, I have always just used 'vi' as my development environment.

3. Unlike Windows, Linux is designed in such a way that even if your app crashes, it wont take the whole system down with it. It is possible to write a program which will consume all the memory/disk available, but that is slightly different... There may be an easy solution to that, but I am not aware of it.

4. Other than the socket (networking) interface, most things are identical for a CLI program. If you are designing a GUI, then obviously the two platforms diverge greatly.

HTH

Thanks for the responses. I am trying to find a C programming class for me to take. I want to get going ASAP on this.

I want to do GUI but I want to get very familiar with the basics before I start down that road.

Also, I like this new forum.

ERic