03 - Basic setup and exercise files

In case you're wondering about the basic setup that I'll be using through the rest of the course and maybe some of the other options that you might want to use, the last thing that I'd like to do here before we take a look at the project we'll be building and get started is show you what setup I'll be using through this course. So I'll be using Codespaces on this repository, and you can do the same thing. In fact, that's going to be the easiest way to follow along. And then clicking this Code dropdown, and you can see that I already have a few Codespaces open with funny randomly generated names, but you should see a big green button there that says Create a Codespace. If you click that, what that'll do, and I'm just going to click that plus button here. What that'll do is it will open up something that looks like Visual Studio Code and is Visual Studio Code, but running in your browser. So this is a great way to develop alongside me here, because not only does this have all of the necessary technology set up, right, things like Node.js are already installed, but also it's very easy to check out branches in this. You can either go to the Source Control tab over here, or what you can do is you can open up the terminal and type in Git commands just like you would be able to do in a local copy of Visual Studio Code. So for example, if you want to check out a branch, you can just say git checkout. And what I've done is I've actually named all of the branches according to the start and end state of each file. So if you want to check out the code for the second video in the first section, you could simply say git checkout 01_02_ and then if you wanted the ending state of that code, you would just add end onto that, and sure enough, that would take you to that branch and your code would be in the right state. Now, if you don't want to use Codespaces, you don't have to. You could always use a local version of Visual Studio Code, which would look very similar to what I'll be doing here, and you could also use any IDE that you want to. If there's an IDE that you're more comfortable with, feel free to use that. However, if you do decide to use a local IDE, you'll want to make sure that you have the latest version of Node.js installed, and you can get that just by going to nodejs.org and downloading the latest LTS version. So anyway, that's pretty much all you need to know. Let's take a look at the project that we'll be building.