I will be purchasing a new Mac book pro for my personal use very soon. I was just wondering is it good for C programming? I know there are programs like Cocoa and Xcode for the mac. But later on I am thinking about once I need to start taking some Computer Science classes and C programming classes do they mainly require you to use windows based programs? If so I would just use boot camp or parallel. I guess all I am trying to ask is, is programming on a mac common?
yes.
If you're sticking with just the C standard library, which hopefully a basic C programming course will do, then it should be fine. If they try to force unportable things on you (like conio.h and such), then you may very well have issues trying to get their code to run.
Which in a way is a good thing, because if the code they teach you consistently fails, it means they're not teaching standard C at all, but instead some weird dialect known as "works for me C".
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
You can always set up a cross-platform compile though (ie a windows compiler on your mac) or you could run a windows compiler under an emulator such as wine.
