Useful Tools

Editors

While you can use simple text editors to write your code such as TextWrangler, Notepad, Notepad++, Emacs, or Vim, it is best to install and use professional editors that give you advantages for web development. Good examples are:

1. Brackets
2. SublimeText

File Transfer Clients

You will need to use a file transfer client to move files from your own computer to your account on the CS web server. There are several options:

1. FileZilla - works for both Mac and Windows machines
2. Fetch - works for Macs, need to install it from LTS page. Here is a video of how to use it.
3. WinSCP - works for Windows

All these tools need to be used with the SFTP option, standing for Secure FTP.

Online Tools

The following online tools can be used to check for HTML and CSS errors, Javascript or JSON errors, or to write code and share with others:

1. W3C HTML Validator
2. CSS Validator
3. JSLint - Javascript Code Quality
4. jsFiddle - test HTML/CSS/Javascript code online
5. CodePen - similar to jsFiddle

The Inspect Element

We will be using the Chrome browser in this course. Chrome has some powerful Developer Tools that allow us to inspect the application we're writing in different ways. We will be using Inspect Element to debug CSS and HTML.

Here are some useful resources to learn Inspect Element:

1. A video about Inspect Element
2. Notes on Inspect Element

The Command Line

Later in the semester, we will need to work on the command line of a terminal, and you might want to start learning about how to input commands in the command line early on. There is a Command Line Crash Course website that can help you with that.

Git and GitHub

If you want to work with your peers on the same project, you might want to use Git and GitHub. Git is not trivial, but you can use tools that might make it easier to learn and use.

1. GitHub for Mac
2. GitHub for Windows
3. Learn Version Control with Git