landondyer

Ding!

Bill could hang out on the sidewalk in front of Yahoo and hand out a billion bucks (total) in hiring bonuses to people who know how to spell "Java," and it'd be far, far cheaper.

I would add: A debugger that works, and an IDE that helps you get the job done (versus endless cycles of "print" debugging).

I'd rather use a moderately crappy language in a decent development environment than a wonderful language that was lacking tools support. It's not all about the language.

Dang, choices, choices. K&R, of course. Followed closely by _Software Tools_, and Lion's Notes on V6 Unix.