[Beowulf] g77 limits...

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

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