Initial Setup

Before we begin with anything, here are some applications we recommend you getting. They will make your life easier in the long run in terms of programming and development!

Terminal

A terminal window gives us a Command Line Interface (CLI), which is a means of interacting with the computer where the user issues commands in the form of successive lines of text (command lines). In programming and development, a terminal is important because it allows us to perform version control (to be covered in the Git & Github tutorial), package installation, compile code, and much more! Unfortunately, Windows’ Command Prompt does not behave the same way as the Terminal of the Mac due to differences in Operating System design between the two systems; in our Git & Github tutorial, we will go over how to install Git Bash for Windows, which emulates a Terminal. Also, when using terminal (or Git Bash), your mouse cursor doesn’t work anymore! In order to navigate a terminal, you’ll have to use the arrow keys.

If you are a Mac user, you can access your Terminal in your list of Applications; the icon is a little black rectangle. It should look something like this (the color of your terminal can be different based on your default settings):

Text Editor

Technically, code is a bunch of letters and numbers following certain rules, so you just need somewhere that you can type it out. Using an application such as Word is not ideal, because it has auto-spelling and capitalization, which often makes typing code difficult. There are certain applications designed to make reading and writing code easier; these are referred to as text editors. The beauty of text editors is that they don’t auto fix your code to the rules of grammar and words; instead, a good text editor has various color schemes that help you read you code more easily with what’s called syntax highlighting.

Side Note: Why do people code on black screens? If you are coding a lot, then you are looking at the computer screen for quite a long time. If you are always staring at a bright white screen, it get uncomfortable after a certain amount of time. Thus, many programmers prefer to use dark-colored screens.

Throughout our tutorials, we will be using a text editor called Sublime Text. The name says it, it’s probably one of the most widely used text editors because of all it’s sublime features. Here are the steps to obtain it (Windows and Mac OS X installation instructions are separated):

Windows

1. Go to https://www.sublimetext.com/3. Choose the version corresponding to your computer.
2. You always have to download according to what kind of machine you have, whether your machine runs on Mac OS X or Windows. For Windows, it also matters what type of machine it is: 32 or 64 bit. You can check this by following the instructions here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/which-operating-system
3. Go to your Downloads folder and click on the .exe file; follow the instructions there to download Sublime Text. After it is complete, open Sublime Text.

Mac OS X

1. Go to https://www.sublimetext.com/3. Choose the version corresponding to your computer.
2. To see what version of OS X (the operating system for Apple computers) is on your machine, you can follow here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201260
3. Go to your Downloads folder, and click on the .dmg file you downloaded; you’ll be prompted to click and drag the Sublime Text icon into your Applications folder. You might be warned by a prompt that this was downloaded off the web, and are you sure you want to open it. Just click Open.

Once you’ve opened up Sublime, click File at the top, and then New File. Now, you can enter any text you’d like!

Sidenote 1: if you want to change the color scheme on your Sublime:

Mac: Sublime Text (on top toolbar) > Preferences > Color Scheme > Color Scheme — Default

Windows: Preferences> Color Scheme > Color Scheme — Default

Sidenote 2: monokai bright is a very popular choice

Screenshot for Mac; In Windows, the steps are very similar

Mac Users ONLY: Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OS X. A package manager automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs. We like Homebrew because it is a command line tool, so once you have Homebrew, installing software repositories, such as Python, is as simple as typing the following command in your Terminal:

brew install python

(Don’t type this in YET)

We won’t be using brew for the first few tutorials, but it will come in handy later; if you delve into more development, you will definitely be happy to have Homebrew at your service.

To install Homebrew, simply open your Terminal, and paste the following lines of code:

/usr/bin/ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Nice! You are all set to move on to Tutorial 1: Git & Github!