The GNU Software Development Environment (GDE) is a full-featured and often coordinated development environment. It consists of a wide variety of largely independently developed tools that, as a whole, provide an environment that eases the tasks involved in producing high quality professional software. And, by the way, it happens to be freely down-loadable. Most of these tools have been developed by and for professionals and have been provided to the programming community for a wide variety of reasons. This book will generally ignore the reasons why people would develop these tools, and instead focus on why you would want to use them.