Hi Roy! :-)

 RJT> I have a lot to learn about programming on that platform,  any 
 RJT> suggestions as to what might be some good places to start?
I cannot even tell you how *I* learned it. I guess I mostly just read
newsgroups discussions and read some sources for programs that interested
me. I could program before, just in other languages. Learning C syntax was
easy, the hard part (as always) is getting to know the standard library
functions.

A good book on C programming that discusses library features and functions
that are part of the C standard would be a good start, I guess. There are
some around that focus on the Unix environment in particular, I think. If I
needed one, I would probaby visit amazon.de (or .com in your case) and look
for something.

On Linux, if you have the man-pages package installed, (almost) all of the
common library functions and syscalls have manpages of their own, so you
don't need to remember function parameters by heart. Most of the time, you
also find information on which standards this function is part of (so you
can avoid non-portable code). Sometimes, you even get example code in the
manpage.

For example, the dlopen() and dlsym() functions I mentioned in the previous
post are documented in

    man 3 dlopen

There is an example at the end of the manpage that illustrates how to load
a library (which could also be a module of your program, it doesn't have to
be a system library), find a symbol in it, and call the corresponding
library function by pointer.

If you're looking for some function, there are no really good ways of
finding it. For glibc stuff,

    info libc

has introductions to everything. Sometimes apropos can help, too:

    apropos dynamic

would have turned up the dlopen(3) manpage among others.

Ciao
Pascal

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