Question

I was just thrust into Linux programming (Red Hat) after several years of C++ on Win32. So I am not looking for the basics of programming. Rather I am looking to get up to speed with things unique to the Linux programming world, such as packages, etc. In other words, I need to know everything in https://www.redhat.com/courses/rhd251_red_hat_linux_programming/details/ without spending 3K. Any ideas of how I can acquire that knowledge quickly (and relatively cheaply)?

Update: The things that I am used to doing on Windows like building .exe and dlls using VC++,
creating install scripts etc are just done differently on Linux. They use things like yum, make and make install, etc.
Things like dependency walker that I take for granted in the windows world constantly send me to google while doing linux. Is there a ‘set’ of new skills somewhere that I can browse or is this more of a learn as you go?

The primary problem is this: As a very experienced programmer in Windows,I am having to ask simple questions like what’s the difference between usr\bin and usr\local\bin and I would like to be prepared.

Answer 1

Edited because I had to leave a meeting when I originally submitted this, but wanted to complete the information

Half of that material is learning about development in a Unix-like environment, and for that, I’d recommend a book since it’s tougher to filter out useful information from the start.

I’d urge you to go to a bookstore and browse through these books:

• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens and Rago – this book covers threads, networking, IPC, signals, files, process management
• Unix Network Programming, Volume 1 by Stevens – This book is focused on network programming techniques, design – you might not need this until much later

• Unix/Linux System Administration – This book covers the more system administrator side of stuff, like directory structure of most Unix and Linux file systems (Linux distributions are more diverse than their Unix-named counterparts in how they might structure their file system)

  Other information accessible online:

• GCC Online Manual – the comprehensive GNU GCC documentation

• Beej’s network programming guide – A really well written tutorial to network programming with the use of the BSD API. If you have done work with winsock, this should be mostly familiar to you.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5’s Deployment Guide – talks specifically about Red Hat EL 5’s basic administrative/deployment, like installing with package manager, a Red Hat system’s directory structure…
• make – Wikipedia article that will have links to the various make documentation out there
• binutils – These are the Linux tools used for manipulating object/binaries.
• GNU Build System – Wikipedia article about the traditional build system of GNU software, using autoconf/automake/autogen

Additionally, you will want to learn about ldd, which is like dependency walker in Windows. It lists a target binary’s dependencies, if it has any.

And for Debugging, check out this StackOverflow thread which talks about a well written GDB tutorial and also links to an IBM guide.

Happy reading.