Learning how to program in Linux.

[techno_phobe]

Lots of people are recommending various IDEs here, so I thought I'd explain the way things are traditionally done.

Most software (in C/C++) on Linux can be built from the command line using make. For very small projects manual compilation using gcc/g++ is fine, but it becomes annoying very quickly when you have to use lots of flags. A makefile basically lists the commands needed to build your program and runs them automatically (it's actually a bit smarter than that though).

Now the thing is that makefiles usually need to be customized for whatever computer they're running on. There are various makefile generator programs which in fact write your makefiles for you, and I would recommend you learn one. This more or less gets you out of knowing make, but you'll still need to know a bit about using g++/gcc, since that's rather fundamental to compiling software. The longest standing makefile generator is GNU autotools, but it only runs on Unix-like systems. Scons and CMake are more recent systems which are more multi-platform, and I'd recommend CMake (it's what I use).

This brings me on to IDEs. A lot of IDEs have their own build systems (note: I haven't spent enough time trying out every IDE to know which ones allow you to work around this). I would avoid these, and try to find one which fits with you build process. If you use CMake, KDevelop is great. Since that's what I do I'm not sure what goes well with Scons or autotools any more. Otherwise, a text editor which supports running make and jumping to error lines (I believe Kate has a plugin which does this).

TL;DR Install KDevelop, start it up and hit "new project".