Recently I trying to learn Ladder Logic programming for PLCs, but I want to know if there is any IDE to create Ladder programs better that Step7 or cx-programmer? Is there any plugin for Visual Studio or Netbeans that I can use? Finally, is it better to work with PLCs under Linux or Microsoft Windows?
UPDATE 1 : After googling about this, I found out that Ladder programming is not depend on the PLC brand or its model, so I did not mentioned any brand in my question.
Answer
What is your goal? In almost all cases, your IDE is dictated by the PLC manufacturer, and your PLC brand is spec'd by the customer when they buy the machine. They spec the PLC because they need to have something that they can go online with for maintenance and troubleshooting. Since the software is proprietary and absurdly expensive, they don't want to get a new software license for every machine in the plant and have to relearn new software, while they are bleeding money of manufacturing downtime.
So if your goal is to enter the industry, you want to find out what plants in country tend to use. In North America it's usually Allen-Bradley a.k.a Rockwell Automation, which is programmed with RSLogix 5000 (edit: the recent versions of RSLogix 5000 have been rebranded as Studio 5000). In Europe, it's typically Seimens, but I have no experience with them.