hello all,

i am totally computer newbie and don´t know anything about programming in any languages....

but i have enger to learn and interested in developing program.

please inform me about the way to get started ...is it differient between windows programming and unix ??

do i have to spend lot of money doing so.

thanks

I would say start with basic C. If you have Linux you already have a C compiler.
Here's where I started... A CUJ magazine.

Try ASM too. That's really fun!!!

KC

Here is a newbie-friendly tutorial. It uses java, but the basics are very similar in C or perl.

Micro$oft tries to make it different by inventing their own "standards". You can ignore them and use cross-platform libraries like gtk and SDL instead.

No, all you need is a good text editor (like nedit, bluefish or setedit) and a compiler. Perl and gcc come with every Linux distro, and java SDK can be downloaded from http://blackdown.org/

(like emacs )
... or interpreter, should you choose an interpreted language.

I would suggest python (www.python.org) for a first programming language; it's *really* easy to learn, and usable in the real world too. Once you have an understanding about what programming is about, you will easily pick up any other language.

I think perl has too many arbitrary special cases (files have their own namespace, you can't assign a regex to a variable (afaik)). With C, you have to understand too many low-level details(*). Java is just too big.

(*) However, I recommend that once you've grasped python, you learn C asap. Most programs in GNU/Linux are written in either C or C++. Once you've learned C, learn C++ too. Good books:

How to think like a computer scientist (learning with python) (by FIXME--Probably not Guido van Rossum, the inventor)
The C Programming Language (by and aka `K&R' -- the inventors)
The C++ Programming Language (by Stroustrup -- the inventor)
The C++ Annotated Reference Manual (aka `ARM', by Stroustrup (iirc))

No matter what you choose for your editor and your language, I wish you luck & joy

--Jonas

PS. I'd also suggest that you at some point learn some basic bash scripting (see (maybe) Advanced Bash Scripting Guide). Enough to understand this at least:
for i in `seq 1 100`; do wget http://www.foo.com/bar$i.html; done