[Burn_Cycle]

Hey everyone, I am now just starting my new adventure into computer programming. I am eager to learn but it is hard teaching myself. Ill spare you the details about myself. I am sick of windows and i was wondering which OSP would be better to go with. Unix or Linux. Im not too sure what the difference is. I've read a little bit about the two but still believe some guidance would be a lot better then just diving into one of the two. Any information that you can share on which of the two is generally better will be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot for your time.
Johnny

[A-mak]

unix costs money.. linux is free.

Unix was invented first, good server os.. Linux was built being based off unix.

Defenetly go for linux for programing, There's probably a special programing distro out there just for you (go find it)

[jmhill1976]

Also, many flavors of UNIX are propriety and/or require expensive hardware platforms to run on. Linux will run on very ordinary PC components that you could purchase exclusively at "Worst Buy" (if you were a fool who was easily parted with his money). I've never run FreeBSD, but it is an alternative.

And, as previous poster mentioned, Linux is similar enough to UNIX that you can easily transfer skills. C, Shell Scripting, Python, PHP, and Perl are quite transferrable across *nix platforms.