All right.
So I just want to quickly go over the tools that I'll be using throughout the course and what I would
recommend.
And these are just kind of the major tools as well as some of the text editor extensions I'll be using.
Now, when it comes to a text editor, of course, you can use whatever you'd like.
I'm going to be using Visual Studio code.
That's what I also recommend.
It's very, very popular, especially in the Web development community.
It's cross-platform, so it doesn't matter if you're on Windows or Mac or Linux, but that's what I'll
be using.
So and again, I'll show you some of the extensions I'm using as well after I'd also suggest installing
Git if you don't already have it.
If you've been doing any kind of programming or any kind of web development, then you should already
have git on your system.
I'd also suggest having a GitHub account and when we deploy this project at the end, we're going to
be using a service called Render.
And basically we can just select our git repository and just and just deploy it from there.
So definitely get that installed and then you're going to need NodeJS on your system because we're going
to be using NPM quite a bit.
And obviously our back end is going to be written in NodeJS Express and a bunch of other NPM packages
as well.
So get that installed and you can install either the long term support or the latest current version.
It doesn't really matter for this course and we'll be using Postman to interact with our back end.
So before we create our interface and we'll be going back and forth from front end to back end, but
when we're creating our initial routes, we're going to need a way to test them.
So we'll be using Postman and I'm going to show you how to use it where we can create a workspace,
we can create folders and collections, and we can save requests, create environment variables.
So we'll be using Postman quite a bit.
And then as far as extensions and plug ins, I would suggest installing the React developer tools.
If you're using Chrome or if you're using Firefox.
And then the Redux dev tools, which I think are really, really important because that will show you
your entire state, all of your actions, etcetera.
So I would get those installed, whether you're using Chrome, Firefox.
And then as far as extensions, let's just jump into VS code real quick.
So I have quite a few extensions installed.
As you can see, I have about 51, but there's only a couple that I would suggest using and you don't
have to, but they do.
They will help your developer experience.
So one is this Es7 Redux, React Redux snippets and this will just allow us to quickly generate a component,
whether it's a regular function or an arrow function, however you want to format it.
I prefer to use arrow functions and have the export at the bottom so I can just type in F and then hit
tab or enter and it generates a component.
So I'll be using that quite a bit.
Let's see what else.
Prettier is something I would recommend, which is a code formatter.
So I have it set up so that when I save it automatically formats my code and adds the correct indents
and so on.
And I am using semicolons.
I did go about a year and a half where I wasn't using them in courses, but I'm back to using them.
So if I do miss a semicolon, it will add it in for me.
But of course that stuff is up to you.
That's all preference.
And then let's see, there's also a JavaScript snippets.
This right here, JavaScript, ES6 code snippets.
I use this for like console logs because you can just do CLG enter and trycatch you can just spell out
just right Trycatch and hit enter and it will create the structure you can do use it for conditionals
and stuff like that.
So it does come in handy.
And then let's see what else.
Copilot I am going to be using this quite a bit through the course just to because I'm not the fastest
typer.
So if it's going to give me what I need anyway, then I'll use it.
And a lot of times it does because I already have the first version of this project on GitHub.
So it, it looks at that and I can just hit tab and instead of typing everything out and that's pretty
much it.
I mean, as far as my VS code theme, I'm using the GitHub theme.
It's GitHub dark and what else here?
Yeah, I'd say that that's about it.
As far as as far as what I'll be using.
But of course, if you have your own set of extensions that you want to use, that's absolutely fine.
So that's it.
Let's go ahead and jump in and we're going to start to create our project.