how can i achieve my goals?

[theoldnyx]

i have been working with Linux for few months and the reason is that i wish to work and develop applications under *nix platforms i have two goals with 2 questions
1- in the mean time i wish to work as a Linux administrator but since there is a lot of distro out there i don't know which one i should really work on to gain the required experience, should i focus on Red hat distros or Debian based distros?

2- in the future i want to work as a professional application developer under *nix platform i have been working with c programming for almost 2 years now and i started to study socket programming through c and i want to use c language in my future work ,some people told me that no one use c any more is this true and what kind of languages should i start learning java to achieve my goal?


thanks

[techieMoe]

1- in the mean time i wish to work as a Linux administrator but since there is a lot of distro out there i don't know which one i should really work on to gain the required experience, should i focus on Red hat distros or Debian based distros?

The vast majority of businesses out there running Linux are doing so using one of the 3 main vendors: Redhat (Redhat Enterprise Linux), SuSE (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), or Mandriva. In the USA, it's more Redhat/SuSE than anything else. In Europe, it's more Mandriva. All three of these distributions are Redhat-based.

To get some practice on Redhat Enterprise, I recommend downloading the free clone CentOS. You can download SuSE SLED and Mandriva directly from their sites for free.

2- in the future i want to work as a professional application developer under *nix platform i have been working with c programming for almost 2 years now and i started to study socket programming through c and i want to use c language in my future work ,some people told me that no one use c any more is this true and what kind of languages should i start learning java to achieve my goal?

Be wary of anyone who says "No one uses YYY programming language or ZZZ programming language anymore." These people are almost always ill-informed and more often completely wrong.

The Linux kernel is still written actively in C, and most of the applications written for Linux (and other operating systems) are still done in either C or C++.

Java is a useful language and there are lots of companies using it too. There are just as many companies who still use and maintain code in COBOL, believe it or not.

Keep up your C skills. They won't become obsolete any time soon. If you want to pick up Java as well, it certainly won't hurt. The syntax is very similar to C++.

Programming languages are a lot like distribution choices or flavors of ice cream; everyone has their favorite and they're more than happy to give you a litany of reasons why it's superior to all others. You need to filter through all that and find what is going to get you a job.

[harner]

I would go get a RedHat cert and brush up on other production-used distros. CentOS (RedHat-based I believe), Debian, and SLES (and openSUSE) should get you started. Learn how the different distros work. After all, Linux is Linux right?

I don't know much about programming, but if you want to reach out a little more, then check out Sourceforge and help out on one of the projects on there. You will learn how to implement the projects on different *nix platforms and it should expand your horizon a bit.

Hope I could help.

Edit: Beat me to it, Moe!

[theoldnyx]

thank you guys
techieMoe that's what i believe too i mean i believe that c is not just a programming language i believe it's a culture a way of thinking if i may say that's why i wanted to use it in my
thanks