It is always difficult to get started with something you don't know at all.
I still remember after reading a lot of articles and books regarding UNIX and GNU/Linux, I am fascinated with it. And I believed if I can get a hello world working in GNU/Linux, I can do anything else too on GNU/Linux.
So I carefully crafted my first hello world in C with vim:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
Then I went on to compile it with GCC:
$ gcc test.c
$ ls
a.out test.c
Looks all great, I generated my very first executable image from test.c, now just need to run it:
$ a.out
a.out: command not found
$ ls
a.out test.c
$
I became completely lost at this stage ... obviously I didn't know anything about search path, I didn't even know there is the thing called environment variables. All I did know is some basic C syntax and nothing more.
It is hard to imagine at that time (2002/2003), the information on internet is
not that abundant and search didn't reveal any information on $ a.out: command
not found. After digging into a UNIX book in college library for a week I
noticed one example, instead of doing $ executable it did $ ./executable.
This is one of my most happy times ever, right away I realized the current
folder is not searched for a.out and I just need to type $ ./a.out instead to
get my first hello world working. Yay ~~~
GNU/Linux, and the entire open source community, is essentially becoming the language. It is like English is a must-to-learn if you want to communicate with rest of the world, GNU/Linux is the platform for the entire open source community, and even M$ finally gives in and become one of the major contributor to open source community, and its latest windows OS even supports a Linux subsystem just to better support all those user space applications that was only able to run on Linux can now also run on windows (my last try in 2017 shows it still has a long way to go though, but definitely better than nothing).
GNU/Linux is still one of the most efficient operating systems out there, completely free, super stable and reliable, runs across super computers, PC, mobile phones and a lot more.
Having said all those good parts of GNU/Linux, this is not even the major reason
for software engineer to use GNU/Linux. In my view, the main reason is that
setting up a development environment on GNU/Linux is really easy, if not set up
by default. From console-based development, to IDEs, all you need to do is
something like $ sudo apt install My-Loved-Application and you are all done.
Using GNU/Linux means you invested yourself in something that has the biggest scope and return in the future as a software developer.
Now looking back my old days, I really wish there was some UNIX guru around me to point out this silly searching path issue. But in a M$-Windows dominated environment, where almost every one is using graphical environment and IDEs, it was not that easy to come across such a UNIX guru. I, somehow, always wanted the hard way, because I always had this feeling that IDEs are cheating, not clean, hard to reproduce the same thing. Astonishingly all those naive feelings at that time proved all true even today. And after an amazing 15 years of my first C hello world program, I am still not using any IDEs and still working 99% of the time in a text console, including right now writing this blog post from a shell cnosole using vim.
The entire college culture doesn't really change even today in China. My cousin graduated from college computer science major still knows very little about UNIX systems.
So, if you are a newbie and want to starts learning GNU/Linux and software development in general, how do you get started by yourselves? Here is some recommendations:
Congratulations, hopefully with only a few minutes, you stepped into the amazing world of GNU/Linux and open source software.
TBD.