Unix Tools
If your primary operating system is Unix (or a Unix derivative such as Linux), then learning C makes perfect sense. Large portions of Unix itself were written in C, and it's still a popular language for building Unix tools.
Unix people tend to be fanatical about their text editors (post a message to any newsgroup about emacs versus vi and watch the bullets fly), but there are worthy IDEs available too. Naturally, most of these are open source, such as Eclipse (www.eclipse.org), KDevelop (www.kdevelop.org), and Anjuta DevStudio (http://anjuta.sourceforge.net, Figure A.11).
Figure A.11. Anjuta DevStudio is a popular open source IDE that runs on Unix.
✓ Tips
If Eclipse, KDevelop, and Anjuta DevStudio aren't to your liking (or if they aren't available for your version of Unix), SourceForge (www.sf.net) has dozens upon dozens of IDEs for your consideration.
This book doesn't discuss the make command, but it's a common tool for Unix. Although it's normally used with Makefiles to dictate how an application should be built, it can be used on its own. If you type make myprogram in the same directory as a myprogram.c file, make will compile the application for you, using the standard C compiler.