c language

[Fairlight]

Four score and seven years--eh, screw that!
At about Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 01:28:09PM -0500,
Kenneth Brody blabbed on about:
> On 1/17/2010 11:35 AM, ROBERT PULLIAM wrote:
> > I am a novice programmer and purchased a book on programing in c.  Is there a way to do this on a windows machine or a mac so that I can compile and run the programs in the tutorial portion of the booki.
> 
> There are versions of "gcc" available for many platforms.
> 
>      http://gcc.gnu.org/

If you need to do network coding or GUI coding, you want to avoid the MSDOS
port of gcc because the APIs to that functionality aren't made available
via the straight gcc port the last time I tried it.  You'd then want to
install cygwin and use gcc under that environment if you want/need those
things--although a better solution than cygwin is given below.

> Also, if you're not too MS-phobic, Micosoft Visual C Express is free:
> 
>      http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/

For me, it wasn't a matter of MS-phobic, it was a matter of, "Boy, this IDE
has a huge learning curve compared to more traditional environments!"  If
you can't plug in a project that's actuall got a VC++ setup included and be
compiling inside an hour, it wasn't designed correctly.

My own response to this dilemma would be (and is) to grab Sun's VirtualBox
(www.virtualbox.org), install that, grab a CentOS 5.4 image, install that
as a guest OS, and do development in the virtual machine environment.  I
have an entire LAMP development system running 24/4 on my Windows XP box.
A good deal of compiling was necessary when setting up my environment
originally, as I needed a bunch of tools that weren't available as
packages, or that I needed newer versions of.

With the ethernet for the VM in bridged mode on its own IP#, you get the
best of both worlds at once.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,