Let me start by saying that you don’t need to complete this lesson right now. In the first couple of lessons in this course, you’ll start by programming inside of your browser - so you won’t need an integrated developer environment - an IDE - installed on your computer, to go through those lessons.
However, in later parts of this course, you will find us writing code inside of Visual Studio Code, or VSCode as it’s more commonly known.
Now you don’t NEED to use VSCode to write Javascript. You can write Javascript with any text editor, even something like Notepad. If you have been programming for a while, perhaps with other languages, you might be familiar with other IDE-s like Vim, or Eclipse. Again, if you know how to set up your development environment, feel free to skip this lesson.
This lesson is for people who haven’t used an IDE before, or would like to set one up that works really well for Javascript, which we'll introduce you to, as a part fo this course.
To install VSCode, head over to code.visualstudio.com, and download the package from the link on the homepage. VSCode can be installed on pretty much any OS - the homepage lists download links for Windows, Linux and macOS, and there are multiple ways to install it
You’re probably familiar with how to install applications on your operating system, so I’m not going to go into detail there. Instead, I’m going to continue assuming that you’ve gotten it installed. In the next lesson, we'll start by installing a plugin to VSCode that is pretty much essential when you're writing Javascript.