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Tools of the Trade

  1. A text editor
    • My personal editor of choice is Sublime Text 3. It comes with all of the features needed for modern programming. It is a paid service, but it comes with an unlimited free evaluation period. Thanks, Sublime Text!
    • VSCode text editor is beloved by many, many people. It has many (or more) of the same features of Sublime Text, though many find its interface bulky and busy.
    • There are many more to choose from, but I recommend one of the above two. It doesn't matter what editor you pick. What matters is the code you write.

The text editor is the tool where you will be writing your code and markup.

  1. A Web Browser

The browser is the tool that reads and interprets the HTML and CSS you and others write. Just as French is spoken in France, Japaneses is spoken in Japan, and Antarctican is spoken in Antarctica, HTML and CSS are the languages spoken in Browserland. And you're about to become fluent in telling the browser what to do.

Different browsers offer different levels of support for the code and markup you may write. You will eventually want to get to a point where your code looks great on any browser that opens it, but to begin with, make it look great on one browser.

For the record, the above three browsers work as well as another for 97% of the work you'll do in the beginning.

If you are truly interested, check out caniuse to see a visualization of the current state of browser feature support.

Let's move on.