Will Mac work for me?

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pitythefool

Guest
I'm in the market to buy a laptop, at the moment I just have a *cough* Windows desktop...

I'm really keen to use 'buying a new machine' as an excuse to try out a Mac. BUT. I'm a computer science student, and so a lot of the stuff I'll use the laptop for is programming etc, but this will only really supplement what I use my main machine for. (I'll continue to use this, more for screen real-estate than anything else).

I just wondered what the availability for programming tools is like, and how well things are 'transferrable'. I.e. I don't want to find that something I coded on my Windows machine won't compile on my Mac.

Due to cash, I think the most I can stretch to is a 14" iBook. Admittedly, it will get a lot of use just as a web-browser etc, but there will be some Java/C++ development in there too.

I think I basically need someone to say "yeah, I do loads of development on my Mac" and then I will sail confidently into the Apple Store ^_~

Thanks in advance.
 
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Cloudane

Guest
Should be good for development, given its BSD background I think you can get all the standard *nix development tools etc.

As long as you don't program in Visual Basic or create applications in Access, you should be all set IMO.
 
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In my CS program, there were basically two kinds of people: 1) Those who used a Mac for everything and 2) Those who had to constantly switch between Windows (for "normal" things ) and Linux (for programming things.)

OS X includes Java and the GCC (C/C++/Objective C) compilers out of the box; just open up a shell in Terminal and start coding. Alternatively, there are IDEs such as Apple's XCode
(See http://www.apple.com/macosx/developertools/ for more information)
 
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I think Mac is a great choice, seeing as it comes with Perl and a test editor in the terminal ;)
 

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