[CS-FSLUG] Developing on Unix

[N. Thompson]

I've been hunting around for some good documentation for developing on Unix, 
I'm ready to close the doors in Windows which has been nothing but 
inconsistent since I started writing Java programs on it. Another reason I've 
decided to drop development on Windows is that it severely complicates things 
when I have to make sure my programs work on two entirely different operating 
systems and when I have to make sure that I provide packages for the two 
different platforms.

I've spent the last few days trying to learn how to make deb and rpm packages, 
all I found out in that time is that its a lot of work to make packages with 
both, rather then have to bother with umpteen different types of package 
managers I decided it would be better off if I simply wrote my own installers 
using a simple scripting language in Linux and the most logical one to use 
seems to be TCL/TK since its simple, it would be on most if not all 
distributions and it should always come with the TK toolkit (its pretty much 
the Visual Basic of Linux).

There is however a problem, I've no idea how to make makefiles, I've always 
depended on QMake to generate them for me, I've never learned how to program 
using the KDE API's or KDevelop, I wouldn't be able to switch to Glade and 
GTK if I wanted to because I know too little about makefiles and how the 
compilers work and are used in Linux. I also have almost no knowledge of how 
to use most of the command line tools, I know little of bash scripting and my 
programming knowlege doesn't extend outside of the basics of ANSI C++ and the 
Qt toolkit.

What I want to do is learn TCL/TK scripting, some bash scripting, how to use 
autoconf and automake, how to use the command line tools in Linux and how to 
make programs or scripts that can have binary data embedded in and then 
extracted from themselves (like how Sun distributes its Java rpm's). I'm 
looking for some resources from which to learn these things, what I had in 
mind was a book on Unix programming since most of these topics should be 
covered but I do not know how similar Linux and Unix are so I was hoping I 
could ask the list for help.

Would a book on Unix programming be just as good for Linux?

Are there any books you would recommend?