This chapter covers the basics of how to start programming under Linux in various scripting and compiled languages including shell, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++ and Java. The goal here is not to teach you actual programming techniques, but just to show you how to create and execute programs in a number of different languages. Learning the language itself is still your problem.

For the moment, at least, we're going to avoid any discussion of graphical development environments, and concentrate on getting things running at the command line. Whether or not you decide to move on to a graphical programming tool is entirely up to you.

	Note
	At the moment, this chapter is considerably out of place as it will ultimately live much farther down in the final documentation, but it seemed like a useful thing to do right now.