Where to start for development?

[high6]

I have been coding windows for awhile and I want to start coding for linux. Anyone have some good sites to start at?

Also anyone got some tips on going from windows to linux?

[visualAd]

Most applications that run in a UNIX / POISX environment are written in C or C++. Java is also a popular development platform (it guarantees cross platform compatibility) and .NET is also becoming popular; with its equivalent Mono.

There are also other scripting / interpreting languages which run on Linux. The most well known of these is Bourne Again SHell (BASH); which can be compared a little to batch scripts but is an order of magnitude more powerful. Others include Perl, Python and PHP.
The most attractive thing about Linux development is the availability and diversity of development tools available. Most distributions give you the option of including development tools as part of the installation. This, in a nutshell; gives you all the tools you need to write applications in C, C++, Java, Python, PHP and Perl.

Where to start? It depends which background you are coming from. If it is a .NET background Java / Mono is a good starting point. If you are coming from a VB background; immerse yourself in Bash or Perl.

C / C++ are steep learning curves form the likes of VB but they are good languages to know and get into. Many developers get into this area through hacking open source applications and making contributions to the open source community.

If you have never used Linux before I would suggest you familiarise yourself with it first. Especially the way it deals with device drivers, files and the start-up process. Some good distributions to start with include OpenSuSe, CentOS and Ubuntu.de Perl, Python and PHP.

[wossname]

I agree with everything VisualAd said apart from the Mono part. Mono is useless for anything other than C# console applications.

But yeah, I'd heartily recommend CentOS. Mostly because it's a developer-friendly distro as soon as it's installed. If you do an "everything install" you get more development tools than you can shake a big stick at, you get database (MySQL), webserver (HTTPD/Apache) and all the industry standard compilers.

The main compiler suite you'll end up using most likely is gcc (aka g++), which is the de facto standard tool for compiling virtually anything (including linux's own kernel). Learn gcc, use gcc, love gcc.

I really like CentOS because I'm a RedHat devotee. CentOS basically IS RedHat Enterprise Linux but without the tech support license fee, its is 100% compatible with all RHEL stuff. I use CentOS on my own server at home and we are adopting it at work as one of our main Linux development platforms.

The single most important thing we can tell you is to immerse yourself in the terminal environment (Bash as VisualAd mentioned). Don't waste your time with fancy IDEs to start with (in fact I never use any kind of IDE in linux whatsoever, I find them a bad habit). Learn the shell inside out until its second nature and get used to reading "man" pages...

man gcc

...for example.