I take it from reading this and other posts that cutting my programming teeth by learning to code in gedit and the command line, sans dev tools, is a good approach then?
The best way to learn something is through whatever method encourages you to learn.
For some that is starting from zero, others want to start at the highest level and work backwards, others start in the middle and jump around. Whatever can keep you interested.
I agree with x1 that you should start with whatever will keep you going. If the command line appeals to you, check out Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way." It is not at all sans dev tools, but it will have you using sophisticated CLI tools rather than a GUI. I have found it to be a good fit for me personally, and I suspect I'm not alone.
gedit's not bad, but try and work your way into vim/emacs. This will allow you to use the same development/debugging environment that you use on your laptop on remote servers, which will vastly improve your earning potential.
Not to sound like a jerk, but I would really like to see the math you used to determine that learning one text editor versus another increases your earning potential.
I might not have phrased that very well, I was trying to claim that being comfortable with command line tools (the unix "ide") will increase your earning potential as an engineer vs only knowing a gui ide.
Being familiar with command line tools for debugging allows you to troubleshoot issues in production, saving the company money, and troubleshooting issues in production generally means working with command line tools on linux servers. This is valuable even if you're not in operations.
2 examples to back this up (one from a backend developer and one from a frontend developer):
My former boss used to run the Customer Order Workflow (COW) team at amazon. He related to me how useless/slow he felt the first time a production issue popped up and he was trying to get some ungodly combination of WinSCP and notepad working. Obviously he learned vim very quickly after that.
Even if you're not on the "backend", you may find yourself needing to ssh to a server which is reverse proxing to something else, and running curl/wget to try and figure out why the CDN isn't serving the latest version of the CSS file you just created even though you're using a cache busting query string.
Sadly saving the company money doesn't always translate into more for you, but experiences like this generally end up making you a go to guy/girl, which can lead to being a lead engineer.
Thanks. (to all the commenters under this thread).
I was thinking about vim just a bit ago (I hear emacs pinky is a real bitch). Maybe I'll put eclipse on my ubuntu too and check it out (dunno if it has support for python or not. I tried IDLE and didnt like it ... )
I have kind of stalled out a bit lately. maybe it's time for an IDE anyway
I like geany, it is a lot more powerful than gedit, but still a lot simpler than most ide/mega editors. You can hide the features you don't use.
Despite the advice that you must use a terminal editor to edit files remotely, nautilus (& others) let you mount remote folders over ssh and edit them locally with the editor of your choosing. I find it very convenient. I hit a bookmark and start editing, keeping the terminals reserved for commands instead.
