Hi, I'm 16, I'm moderately experienced in VB and I pick stuff up pretty quickly. Basically, I've been using linux for about a year and a half now and have finally pretty much fully made the conversion. Now that I'm using it more, I want to get into programming and development of the programs etc. that I'm using. Where should I start?? Can anyone recommend any books or online tutorials to get me going. What should I learn, bash/python/C/all of them/something else. As you can probably tell, I'm pretty much in the dark on this so any help would be very useful.

What do you want to do? If you want to automate system tasks, play around with the startup scripts, etc. you should probably start off with learning Bash scripting. If you want to do more complex scripting, Perl and Python are where you should turn. You can write fairly complicated applications with perl or Python, but also look at PHP if you're interested in doing Web scripting. If you want to get into hard core application programming, look at C++ or Java. For system programming, C is still the lingua franca. The Linux kernel is written mostly in C, with some assembler for the system specific parts. Ideally, you should try to learn a little bit about everything, but where you go first depends on exactly what you want to do.

Yeaah, I think a bit of everything sounds best. I know quite a lot of PHP/SQL stuff already. I can do a bit of the automating system tasks bash stuff as well, so I can basically just continue learning that. What I was really looking at is system/application stuff, so from your post, I'm thinkinh python, with a bit of C on the side. Is that feasible? Anyone got any suggestions for books etc? Thanks for your helpful post.

Anyone?

I don't know any valuable Python books, there's
tutorials and documentation on their website, though.

As for C: I can HIGHLY recommend Kernighan &
Ritchie, "The C programming language" {2nd edition).


Cheers,
Tink