tips

For someone who spends most of their time in Photoshop or working with relatively simple languages like HTML and CSS, it can be difficult to move to more advanced (and more interesting) programming languages. The transition is significant and requires an overhaul in the way you approach a task or problem.

Being a beginning programmer myself, I have found the following tips very helpful in learning both the concepts behind general programming and the specifics of individual languages.

You probably use Google everyday, but do you know... the Google Snake Game? Googledromes? Memecodes? Googlesport? The Google Calculator? Googlepark and Google Weddings? Google hacking, fighting and rhyming? In this book, you’ll find Google-related games, cartoons, oddities, tips, stories and everything else that’s fun. Reading it, you won’t be the same searcher as before! (From the author of Google Blogoscoped.)

Over the past 25 years, I have moved on from programming languages like Assembly, Fortran, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, C# to Java. Bruce mentions that "Java has been an outstanding development language for the industry because it's brought a remarkable unity and attention to important standards where practically none existed before. But like all programming languages, Java will too fade in time."

My Quick Ruby blog records my progress of learning Ruby and later Ruby On Rails.

This is a list of some handy/common things you can do on the command line in Linux.Note items marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, so you may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste.

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These Linux tips are meant to provide just enough information to whet your appetite for more. They are updated frequently and are not presented in any particular order.

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I'm using a default Mandrake 9.0 installation with KDE as my basis for these tips, but much of what I say below applies to all popular distributions. The menus, command names and/or directory layouts may be different from what I describe below; refer to your documentation.

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