Murray Stokely This chapter was written by Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven So here we are. System all installed and you are ready to start programming. But where to start? What does FreeBSD provide? What can it do for me, as a programmer? These are some questions which this chapter tries to answer. Of course, programming has different levels of proficiency like any other trade. For some it is a hobby, for others it is their profession. The information in this chapter might be more aimed towards the beginning programmer, but may also serve to be useful for the programmer taking her first steps on the FreeBSD platform. To produce the best UNIX-like operating system package possible, with due respect to the original software tools ideology as well as usability, performance and stability. Our ideology can be described by the following guidelines Do not add new functionality unless an implementor cannot complete a real application without it. It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion. The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all. If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all. If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution. Isolate complexity as much as possible. Provide mechanism, rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the client's hands. From Scheifler & Gettys: "X Window System" The complete source code to FreeBSD is available from our public CVS repository. The source code is normally installed in /usr/src which contains the following subdirectories: Directory Description bin/ Source for files in /bin contrib/ Source for files from contributed software. crypto/ Cryptographical sources etc/ Source for files in /etc games/ Source for files in /usr/games gnu/ Utilities covered by the GNU Public License include/ Source for files in /usr/include kerberosIV/ Source for Kerberos version IV kerberos5/ Source for Kerberos version 5 lib/ Source for files in /usr/lib libexec/ Source for files in /usr/libexec release/ Files required to produce a FreeBSD release sbin/ Source for files in /sbin secure/ FreeSec sources share/ Source for files in /usr/share sys/ Kernel source files tools/ Tools used for maintenance and testing of FreeBSD usr.bin/ Source for files in /usr/bin usr.sbin/ Source for files in /usr/sbin