One of the nice things about JavaScript is it is easy to get started writing code. All you need is a text editor and a JavaScript engine to interpret the code.

You can get a simple text editor for free, or you can pay for one that comes with a little more functionality. For a pretty thorough list of text editors, you can view this wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors. There are a couple of editors that I currently prefer: Sublime and Brackets. All the examples in this course will be done using sublime.

As for a JavaScript engine, you already have one in your browser. Every browser comes with a JavaScript engine that will interpret the code. The V8 JavaScript Engine is an open source engine used by Chrome. That is the browser, I will be using during this course, but any browser will do. The V8 engine is used in other projects such as MongoDB and Node.js.

During the course I will frequently open the JavaScript console that comes with Chrome, for executing simple lines of code or for examining things. You can access the JavaScript console in Chrome by pressing Command + Option + J on a Mac or Control + Shift + J on Windows or Linux.

If you are using a different browser, use the commands indicated:

• Firefox:
  • Windows: Ctrl + Shift + K
  • Mac: Cmd + Opt + K
• IE & Edge
  • F12 and then click on the Console tab
• Safari (You must first enable the Show Develop menu)
  • Cmd + Opt + C

There is one section in the course where we talk about loading a JSON file. The content in this section uses the XMLHttpRequest object. This particular object will only work if the HTML page is delivered from a server. We discuss ways to set up a testing server on your local machine. We suggest and show the use of MAMP, which is a free tool. So for parts of this project you will also need access to a server or you will need to install a tool like MAMP in order to set up a server on your local machine.