programming on linux

[Mark Phillips]

Josh,

I just completed a small project and used the opportunity to try my hand at 
bash scripting and python. I knew neither "language"...I use Java a lot today 
with a little C/C++. 

The project involved making email lists for all the teams in our little 
league. Basically, I had to read the names/email addresses from a mysql db,  
group them into each team in each division, remove duplicates (we collect 
email addresses for players, fathers, and mothers and many times all three 
are the same.), and then load them into mailman on our web server.

I found it much harder to get the bash script to work than the python script. 
It may be that python is closer to Java, so I may have picked it up faster. 

The Python book I used was "Learning Python" from O'Reilly and the bash book 
was "Linux Shell Scripting with Bash" by Ken O. Burtech. I must say the 
python book was much much better than the bash book. This may have 
contributed to getting the python script up and running faster.

My 2 cents:

Perl/bash - you have to use it a lot to become proficient at it. For me it is 
hard to keep the syntax straight when I only have an occasional need

Python - easy to learn and use occasionally. Will be my scripting choice in 
the future. (I agree with one poster's comment about indenting lines - I wish 
python used braces instead)

Java - great for web based programming or gui apps. I like the fact that what 
I write on Linux will (most of the time ;-) ) work on Windows and vice versa. 
Servlets/JSP/JBDC are a great combination for applications or web. 

C/C++ - must know if you want to work on most open source stuff. However, 
there are a lot of Java open source projects - not at the level of say KDE or 
Gnome.

Good luck!

-- 
Mark Phillips
Phillips Marketing, Inc
mark at phillipsmarketing.biz
602 524-0376
480 945-9197 fax

On Monday 23 January 2006 02:00 pm, Josh Coffman wrote:
> Greetings from you local village idiot...
> 
>   I'm a windows programmer. I'd like to at least have
> a clue how to program on linux also. Maybe Java. Maybe
> Python or Perl. Anyone care to make recomendations
> that one could fit into an already busy life. I could
> probably best start by doing some reading and then a
> Hellow World type example.
> 
>   I've also got this itch to fix Network Manager to
> run in KDE as well as Gnome, but I'm not ready for that.
> 
> Shin zen ni rei
> -j
> Registered Linux user number 403109
>   http://counter.li.org/
>   
> 
> 
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