Tools of the Trade

Apart from an editor, there are several other tools that a programmer should know fairly well.

Source control

It is essential that to have a tool that allows a team to save and restore code from a central repository. For the kinds of project I have worked on, I have found that cvs works best.

Scripting language

A scripting language is like a swiss-army knife - useful for lots of things, and a must-have in any project. It can be used for:

• Producing C code from shorter descriptions.
• Converting text output from one program to the input required by another program.
• Controlling the execution of multiple programs.

I tend to use Python, gawk, and shell scripts.

Make

A build tool such as make is essential for creating larger programs. There are various make variants available. I tend to use GNU make.