Can't find curses library

Applications Programming
1

I am writing a c program with the use of the curses but when i tried compiling i get the error that the curses library is not found
the header file i included is curses.h
and th command i typed is

gcc -o chat chat.c -lcurses

1) Is this correct in linux?
2) found a file libncurses.so.5.2
Wat is it?

2

Well... on RedHat 6.2 anyway, you should see a files called...
/usr/lib/libcurses.so which links to libncurses.so
/usr/lib/libncurses.a
/usr/lib/libncurses.so which links to libncurses.so.4
/usr/lib/libncurses.so.4 which links to libncurses.so.4.0
/usr/lib/libncurses.so.4.0