My Ubuntu doesn’t compile

I’m quite new with Ubuntu and used to work with RedHat before. Using this new distro, made experiencing a lot of new thins such as what I got today. I was unable to compile several application from source code. The C compiler is installed, but not the essential headers. Therefore, I got the error message below whenever I compiled an application:

C compiler cannot create executables

To allow me compiling the source, here what I need to do:

#sudo apt-get install build-essential

Voila, I’m now able to compile the sources