corderophilosophy.com | Blog
JS - Getting Started
JS: Getting Started
When I first looked into learning JavaScript, one of the most frustrating things was finding someplace that provided fairly clear instructions on just how to get a JS development environment up and running. So, in this post I'm going to try to outline the steps I took to get started.
One thing that I kept coming across was people saying how great it is that all you need in order to write JavaScript is a text editor and a browser -- or really just a browser, since you can write JavaScript right into the browser console. That's all well and good for very small, very quick bits of code. But when I was asking around, I was looking for a place to write more than just a few lines of code. One thing I didn't want to have to trouble myself with was holding the shift key down in order to input multiple lines of code. In the browser console I was using (Chrome), if you press return, that tells the console to run the line of code you've written. It's a small, thing, really, to remember to hold the shift key down, but it was more of a pain than I wanted to deal with.
So the first thing I wanted to do was to get a text editor that was robust enough that I wasn't going to find myself, when I've learned more, wanting a more powerful editor. I wanted something that was customizable and free. There are lots of options, and this is ultimately a personal decision. I chose GitHub's Atom Editor because it seemed the easiest thing to use. It's open source, easy to install, and easy to customize. There are loads of packages that make it a real pleasure to use.
The Atom packages I've got installed are the following: * atom-beautify * atom-jade * atom-live-server * atom-runner * atom-ternjs * autocomplete-emojis * browser-plus * color-picker * emmet * file-icons * file-types * filesize * git-history * git-plus * highlight-line * highlight-selected * jumpy * language-pug * linter * linter-alex * linter-eslint * linter-ruby * minimap * navigate * open-in-browser * rest-client * terminal-plus * wakatime