Software Requirements

Before we dive into the development work, we’ll need to spend some time to ensure that our machines have the necessary development tools and software which will enable us to gain a hands-on experience.

It shouldn’t matter if you’re using Windows or macOS (or a unix distro), you should still be able to get the appropriate software for your OS. Please can you download and install the following:

• GitHub Desktop – for committing your code/work to GitHub using a GUI.
• Atom.io – An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for coding and programming. (You can use any other IDE to your preference, e.g. Visual Studio Code, Sublime, PHP/WebStorm, Eclipse.)
• Postman – for API integration and development. We won't need this immediately but for later on, when we get to API development.
• Sequel Pro for macOS or HeidiSQL for Windows – This is a database client, allowing you to work with MySQL databases (e.g. adding, editing, deleting records, creating new databases, tables and etc.)
• Git Bash for Windows – This will give you a unix emulated command line interface for when we work using the terminal. (You won't need to install this on a unix OS or macOS.)
• Node.js and NPM – This is to be used along with the command line, giving us access and capability to using front-end packages for our development work.
• XAMPP – A popular LAMP stack, giving you the ability to develop in PHP and SQL databases locally on your machine. (If you already have a LAMP stack or have your own preference, e.g. Docker, you can use the one you prefer.)

Once we have all the above installed, we'll be ready to get started with some development work in the next section.