In this course we will use an integrated
development environment, or IDE, called Eclipse.
The reason we chose Eclipse is because it's
widely available on all platforms commonly in use
by people like you interested in this course.
This means Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Other choices you may want to consider
are NetBeans, which is close in features
and availability, and it's also free.
Others are Visual Studio and Xcode.
Visual Studio is available on Windows exclusively,
while Xcode is available on Mac.
All four system can run C just fine,
or you can even run it in console mode.
However, Eclipse is a universally recognized,
good, well-supported IDE and we recommend it.
However, I strongly encourage you to experiment
with others and choose the one you like the most.
To install Eclipse, it's really easy.
All you have to do is go to Eclipse.org,
find the latest version, and download it.
Make sure you download the one
that's appropriate for your machine.
The current version used in this course is Kepler,
which is about a year old.
If you have one that's two years old,
or you should happen to have a newer than Kepler
by the time you watch this movie, that's great.
The C content, the programming features
that you will learn in this course
do not take advantage of the most
advanced features of C language.
Therefore, you would not have any kind of problem
if your IDE is within one or two versions of this one.
Should you need more support and more details,
there is a great course on lynda.com
called Up and Running with Eclipse
which details everything you need to know
to download, install, troubleshoot,
and get ready to work with Eclipse.
Let's go see Eclipse in action.
What you see on the screen right now
is a typical IDE environment.
You have some buttons on the top,
more than you need right now.
This is the main code of the program
which was already created by Eclipse.
There is a left area here where you see all
the projects that will be used in this course,
you see that it's quite a few of them.
So let's go and see what a C program looks like.
Actually, when you first open Eclipse,
you will not see that, but rather you will see
something like this where you have a blank screen.
You may want to start a new project.
In this case, we're going to use
one that's already here.
When you double click on it, you see there
are multiple files that make up this project.
The most important one for the purpose
of this course is the code that was generated
by Eclipse, which is hello world.
Hello world, it's a tradition in computer science,
and each time somebody learns a new language,
this is the first project they create.
When you look on the screen, you will see a lot
of things that you might know from other languages,
or may be completely new to you
so let's briefly take a look at them.
The part in green here that starts
with a slash and a star, this is common.
You strongly encourage to type some kind
of documentation at the top of every program
so you can know what this program was about
should you refer to it later
or in case somebody else looks at it.
Then there's a section here with include.
We will talk extensively about this
in the coming videos, so I'm not
going to focus on this right now.
There's another section here that's actually
the code itself, and you can locate the words
hello world, which is what the program will execute.
In order for a program to run,
we have to do two things.
We have to go to project and build that project.
You will understand more about
building a project in the coming video.
Now there's just two mechanical steps.
So first, we build a project, and if everything
goes as planned, you should see this nice
message here saying build finished.
If something goes wrong, Eclipse will let you know.
Since everything was fine, we are ready
to run our program and see whether it indeed
produces the words hello world.
There are two ways to run a program.
You can either go to run and choose run from here,
or you can hit this green button that's like
a play button, and if you hover it's going
to tell you that you are about
to run program right now.
I hit, and indeed the program ran
with the words hello world
as written in the program.