Basic Programming

[CrusaderAD]

I'm looking to dive into something here. Where would I start for programming something basic in Ubuntu? Say I want to program something with a simple form that does a file lookup or something like that, and then work my way to programming something more complex like an e-mail checker using some sort of API (just an example). Does anyone have any suggestions for where to start and what language / tools to use?

[mo.reina]

python is always good, for the gui i've heard good things about pyglade, though i've never used it.

for python, i recommend:
instant hacking (http://hetland.org/writing/instant-hacking.html)
then follow up with dive into python (www.diveintopython3.org)

i'm starting to look into functional programming (scheme and common lisp), which seems really interesting, but don't have any experience or recommendations as of the moment.

[CrusaderAD]

Thanks for the tips. I might pickup a book on Python too. Not sure yet.

[shawnhcorey]

Glade (http://glade.gnome.org/) is a GUI designer. It can interface with many, many languages. Perl, python, C, and C++ are the few I know for sure. Glade uses gtk2 (GNOME toolkit, version 2) (http://www.gtk.org/) which is readily available in Linux.

As for what language: I suggest you start with one of the modern scripting languages, Perl, Python, or Ruby.

[arvevans]

For the non-programmer it might be easier to start with shell-scripts. This simply the command-line language with commands saved as a series of commands and made executable.

There are a number of tutorials available on-line for shell-script programming. Try doing a Google search for "Shell-script tutorial" to find lots of ways to get started.

[CrusaderAD]

@shawnhcorey I'm taking a look at glade now, looks a little bit like visual studio express.

@arvevans I already got into a bit of shell scripting :) pretty cool stuff and easy to learn. Thanks.

[dv3500ea]

You may want to have a look at quickly (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly). It is aimed as an introduction to python programming on Ubuntu.

[CrusaderAD]

You may want to have a look at quickly (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly). It is aimed as an introduction to python programming on Ubuntu.

Cool, I'll take a look.

[Pyro.699]

I defiantly suggest python as well.

It is powerful, condense and contains many useful library. With it i taught myself multi-threading, creating objects and classes, optimizing my code and much more.

Something fun to do would be to check out Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net) and try to solve the problems with python.

~Cody