All right, so first things first. Before we do anything else, we first have to get set up and ready
for web development.
So I'm going to walk you through a couple of applications that we'll be using pretty much full-time during
this course.
There's two major tools that we'll rely on, and that is going to be the Chrome browser and the Atom
text editor.
And between these two tools, we're going to achieve a lot. Later on in the course when we're introducing
more advanced concepts such as using the command line or using a database, then we'll install other
things as we go along.
But to get started, the most important applications we need to install are just these two.
Now you might already have Chrome installed, but if you don't, then be sure to check out the Web Development
Course Resources list, which I'll link to in this current lesson.
And it's really, really important that you check over here because every single time I mention a
link or every single time I try to point you towards something, the link will show up over here and
you'll be able to click on it to save you all the trouble of having to type it all out.
Open up this page in your browser and just click on this link to go ahead and download and install Chrome.
And that should be pretty simple, and it will guide you through the process.
Now, if you're wondering, do I have to use Chrome?
What if I already have Firefox installed, or what if I want to use Safari?
Normally, I would say that's completely fine.
But in this case, because we're going to use some of the developer tools inside Chrome, and I want
you to be able to do it step by step along with me while watching the videos,
it's best in this case to just simply download and use Chrome.
So now that you've downloaded the browser you need, the next step is to install a code editor.
And out there, there are so many different code editors, for example, Atom or VSCode, Sublime, Brackets.
And if you think about it, all that you need to actually write code is just some form of text editor.
So you could, if you really wanted to, even use something like notepad.
But the downside of Notepad is it doesn't have all of the great features that some of these other specialized
code editors have.
So two of my favorites are Atom and VScode and I use both of them pretty regularly.
Now, in the course videos, you'll see me use Atom.
But if you have a strong preference towards any other code editor that you're already used to that you
want to use instead, then feel free to do that.
But if you are a complete beginner to programming, then I recommend we go ahead and install the Atom
text editor.
And it's completely free to download and install.
So if you just head over to atom.io or go through the Web Development Course resource list, then
you should land on this page. And it very cleverly figures out what system you have that you're running.
Now, if you're a Windows user and you head over to atom.io, you'll see that it automatically
detects that you are viewing this on a Windows computer and then you can just go ahead and again, click
that big yellow download button and you should end up with something that's called something like atom
setup.exe. And you'll be able to see this in your downloads folder.
So now if you just double click on that and it will automatically do everything it needs to install
Atom on your system.
So once you're done, it should open up a new Atom window like so and you would have successfully installed
Atom.
So now as a Windows user, you are done installing Chrome and Atom, and you can head over to the next
lesson where we install some packages to power up our Atom code editor. For a Mac user,
continue listening and I'm going to show you the same process
but on macOS. So all you have to do is just go ahead and click download.
And once download has completed, then you can simply head over to your downloads folder and double
click to unzip that package.
And now you will see Atom show up.
The last thing you have to do is just to move this application into your applications folder. On the
Mac
it's just a matter of heading over to your Macintosh hard drive and then your applications folder and
then dragging in that atom application that you just downloaded in your downloads over into here. And
then you're all done and you're set up with Atom.
So now that you've got Chrome and Atom installed, head over to the next lesson and we're going to start
exploring Atom packages and see the ways that we can stop powering up our Atom code editor.