Ok, excuse my ignorance, but I thoroughly enjoy the API for programming in windows, is their any such thing in Linux terms. i.e. I would like the do some java programming and C++ programming in Linux, but is it all in a text editor or is their an api/ide for it?

I have a Forte for Java 4 (pre-Sun One Studio) for linux, but not sure how you install things in linux...well not entirely.

Any suggestions would be appreciated...

There certainly are many Java IDE's available for linux, Forte and Netbeans for example, as for installing them, well I'm not a linux user myself so I can't really help you there.

And though I've never seen one, there MUST be a nice C++ IDE available as well. Maybe Borland makes a linux version, or DevC++? Search google for it.

I'm not sure about IDE's on linux, as far as I know none exist. There advanced text editors with nice syntax highlighting options. Vim is my favorite editor on linux by all means.

If you are going to be needing a Java IDE, I would highly recommend NetBeans. It is cross-platform, and runs pretty smoothely on both Windows and Linux. It also runs on Solaris (both Sparc and x86), OpenVMS, and MacOSX. I am not a huge Java programmer, so there may be better tools out there.

There's API's for Linux on a lot of things. Here's one place to grab them:

http://www.trier.linux.de/lpac/

Check out http://www.eclipse.org. If you wanto any serious programming in Java, this is the way to go

You can try Magic C++, a visual remote Unix/Linux C/C++ IDE
It looks just like Visual C++ and supprots for editing, compiling, debugging etc.

http://www.magicunix.com

have fun!

KDE has Kdevelop which is a great development environment.

http://www.kdevelop.org/

I hope this helps

Amar