C first, last and always: somewhere or other, you'll come across C code / someone who only knows C and whose high-level pseudocode is all "C like". Try hard to stick to portable C and follow the ANSI standards. [Note: C99, though it is seven years old now, is not well supported except in the newer compilers]
Shell scripting: quick and dirty hacks used to be done entirely in shell script. It's worth knowing enough to be able to read good Bourne shell scripts and, by extension, bash scripts - they crop up all over the place in Linux and "classical" UNIX. Perl: Swiss Army chainsaw - you can do anything script-y in Perl and a whole lot more. It is easy to write poor-quality Perl: the canonical books are published by O'Reilly and Co and known as "The llama book" and "The camel book" aka learning Perl and programming Perl. Get the latest editions. Regular expressions and pattern matching crop up a lot in scripting and Perl. The O'Reilly regexp book by Friedl [Mastering Regular Expressions] is _extremely_ useful. This also covers enough that you'll need to know in order to cope with minimal sed and awk. Some knowledge of make and makefiles may also be useful if you do a lot of programming (possibly of autoconf/automake) but that can be left until you know enough C to be dangerous :) All IMHO, Andy _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf