In this lecture, we'll go over some key things you'll need in your coding environment for this course.

Coding Editor & Terminal

For this course, you'll need a text editor (or IDE) and terminal (command line).

Your text editor (Atom, Sublime, etc.) will give you an easy way to open, view, and edit the code files we cover in this course.

If you don't already have one installed and in use, there are a lot of free options out there to choose from. My personal favorite is Visual Studio Code, but there are several good ones.

A terminal (command line) will also be used extensively in this course alongside the code editor for installing packages, creating/navigating project directories, and executing code.

It's worth noting that the commands used in this course are geared towards macOS and Linux operating systems. If you are on Windows, you may need to find the equivalent command for your operating system in some cases.

Before you get started with this section, we're going to go over the tools and environments required to build our backend.

Node.js & NPM

Node.js is a platform for building fast, scalable server applications using JavaScript and npm is the Node Package Manager for Node.js modules.

You will need an installation of Node.js and NPM on your machine.

Both will be used to manage the libraries needed along the way and execute code.

To get started, let's install Node.js for your platform from its official website. The NPM (Node Package Manager) is included in the Node.js distribution, which we will use to install all of our packages.

To test that you have Node.js installed correctly on your computer, let's run the command line: node -v  and npm -v then you should see the current Node.js version installed.

node -v
v18.2.1
npm -v
8.19.2

Visual Studio Code

In this lecture, we will discuss the importance of having a powerful text editor for software development. One highly recommended option is Visual Studio Code, also known as VS Code.

This text editor is widely used by software engineers and is available on all operating systems. We will cover the steps to download and start using VS Code.

To get started with Visual Studio Code (VS Code), visit the VS Code website and click the download button. Select the correct operating system from the dropdown menu, if necessary.

Once the VS Code file has finished downloading, locate it in your file manager and install it. Make sure to save the VS Code application in a location that is easy for you to access.

There are many Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions that could potentially be useful for our project. However, we won't be able to use all of them. Instead, we will focus on the most popular and effective extensions that can help speed up our development process.

We will be installing the following extensions to enhance our coding experience: auto rename tag, dotenv, and prettier code formatted. These extensions provide helpful features such as autocomplete and code formatting. You can click on the corresponding links to learn more about each extension.

To install extensions in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), let's open VS Code and click the extension icon on the left-hand side. Search for the extension you want and then click 'Install' button.