Don't get too frustrated if you find that it's really hard to get
TinyOS up and running.  Nearly everyone without hacking/extensive
coding experience and who is trying to do something non-trivial in
TinyOS find that they are spending a lot of time debugging code,
trying to make software interact properly, and learning new languages.
My best advice is to sit close to others who have had more experience
and continue to nag them when you run into problems... until they run
away from you ;).

But seriously, here's a list of the tools I have personally dealt with
when using TinyOS... and I was only somewhat proficient in a subset of
these before starting:


NesC
uisp, ncc, gcc, and other tools for compiling and installing NesC
mig, ncg (message interface generator, part of TinyOS)
Java
C
Matlab
Perl
Bash Shell scripting
UNIX utilities and environment variables (ex. diff, locate, find, grep)
PostgreSQL
gdb/gjdb

CVS (concurrent version systems)
Makefile
installing RPMs
Unison (for file synchronization across multiple machines without CVS)

Cygwin Setup
RXVT Setup (terminals)
emacs configurations (for font highlighting)

OrCad (drawing circuits)


I'm not super proficient at any of these now either.  Note that it's
not necessary to really learn every one of those tools (some were to
make my life easier, like using Unison to synchronize between my Linux
machine and my laptop, and RXVT so I could page up in Cygwin using
Shift-PgUp since I have RSI and like minimizing the usage of my
mouse).  But in any case, if you find the going frustrating, just
remember that you're learning a lot along the way!