February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 43. Know How to Use Command-Line Tools
TODAY, MANY SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TOOLS are packaged in the form of integrated development environments (IDEs). Microsoft’s Visual Studio and the open source Eclipse are two popular examples, though there are many others. There is a lot to like about IDEs. Not only are they easy to use, but they also relieve the programmer of thinking about a lot of little details involving the build process.
Ease of use, however, has its downside. Typically, when a tool is easy to use, it’s because the tool is making decisions for you and doing a lot of things automatically, behind the scenes. Thus, if an IDE is the only programming environment that you ever use, you may never fully understand what your tools are actually doing. You click a button, some magic occurs, and an executable file appears in the project folder.
By working with command-line build tools, you will learn a lot more about what the tools are doing when your project is being built. Writing your own make files will help you to understand all of the steps (compiling, assembling, linking, etc.) that go into building an executable file. Experimenting with the many command-line options for these tools is a valuable educational experience as well. To get started with using command-line build tools, you can use open source command-line tools such as GCC, or you can use the ones ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.