Mac Comp Sci major

Hey guys, recently made the big switch and I need some help. Everyone in my major uses Windows. My classes will assign me work with .exe compilers and other things I can't use without vmware or parallels. Is there anything I should know about programming on a mac? I need to be able to work well with mac by the time classes start... I'd rather only use the windows as a last resort if there's no equivalent mac software.

Thanks ahead of time!

I'd go with VMWare, and if you have the space, install Boot Camp for your Windows use. That way if you need to have a fully Windows environment, you are able to use Boot Camp, but otherwise can use VMWare and point to the Boot Camp partition as your virtual machine.

I would give slightly different advice. I would use a VM not boot camp. This way if for whatever reason you hose your windows installation in your programming class you can restore your VM in seconds. With bootcamp you would have to reinstall.

Also programming on a Mac is fine. It is essentially Unix and that is where most programming happens anyway. You just may use different tools to do the programming then those provided for a purly windows class. But, that is what your VM is for. Get 4 gigs of ram in your Mac and you can run your VM in full screen or Unity mode and it will run smoothly and feel native.

I am just finishing up my comp sci degree now, and just bought my MBP at the end of my degree (unfortunately, I must say!). For my last few assignments, I booted up a Windows XP VMWare Fusion virtual machine and did all of my coding in Visual Studio. Other than the menu bar appearing at the top of my screen when I went too far up, I couldn't tell I wasn't running Windows natively. If your degree is anything like mine, you won't be doing any GUI programming (except maybe Java?) anyway, so you don't have to worry about all of the messy differences between the two operating systems.
If, however, you end up doing something a little more "fancy" (say in a graphics or visualization course), I would highly NOT recommend using VMWare Fusion for your coding, since it doesn't communicate directly with the video card and does it all through software (and it sucks, as far as I've been able to test). If this is the case, you will definitely want to get a Boot Camp partition set up. Through Boot Camp, it will be just like you are using a Windows system, and won't get any slowdowns or problems (aside from the usual from a Windows system).
Hope that helps!

Thanks

Thanks everyone for the help! Helped confirm what I was already hopin to do, get vmware and work the programming as best I can in both OS's. I'll probably be back with more problems as the semester gets started.

jav094 said:

Hey guys, recently made the big switch and I need some help. Everyone in my major uses Windows. My classes will assign me work with .exe compilers and other things I can't use without vmware or parallels. Is there anything I should know about programming on a mac? I need to be able to work well with mac by the time classes start... I'd rather only use the windows as a last resort if there's no equivalent mac software.

Thanks ahead of time!

Click to expand...

The Mac comes with everything you need to develop software in a variety of languages. There are many differences between developing on Windows and a Mac, but most of those won't come up during your programming classes.

Developing in Java is cross platform. There are several development environments (Eclipse, NetBeans) that run on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

If your class does require Windows, then running a VM is the way to go. There are three choices on the Mac: VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox. VirtualBox is free. You do need a license for Windows.