Setting Up Your CSE 154 Development Environment

The following is a list of tutorials which will help you set up your machines (read: computers) with the development environment recommended for CSE 154. Please Note: The first quiz section will be dedicated to helping everyone set up their development environment so if parts of this guide are unclear please wait until quiz section to finish setup.

Creating a `cse154` Working Directory

The first and probably most important thing: create a directory (read: folder) to store your CSE 154 work in! A new subdirectory will be created for each assignment. We recommend the following structure:

path-to-your-school-folders/cse154/
  practice-work/
  cp1/
  hw1/
  cp2/
  hw2/
  ...

VS Code and Git

VS Code is our recommended text editor. We will use it to program in the different languages covered in CSE 154, as well as to clone assignment Git repositories.

You need to have VS Code (or another text editor) and Git setup by the end of Week 1 to get started with your first assignment and to follow along in lecture/section. If you already have experience using Git, you may use the same process you're familiar with, but we otherwise strongly recommend you follow the VS Code/Git setup guides for CSE 154, which include helpful packages to support your web development environment in this course.

Node and Local Lint Install

Please Note: You do not have to set up Node.js and JSLint until we start teaching server-side programming around Week 5 of the quarter.

By default JavaScript can only be interpreted and run by a web browser. But when creating server-side programs we need code that can run on a computer (a server is essentially just a specialized computer for handling network requests). Lucky for us, we can use a piece of software called Node.js to do just that. Node.js allows you to run JavaScript on your computer like a regular Java or Python program, while also giving extra functionality that enables you to respond to network requests over the internet––creating the foundation for writing JavaScript that runs on a server!

Below are two guides for installing and setting up Node.js on your computer.

Chrome

You will need a Chrome browser on your machine. Webpages are rendered a bit differently between different browsers, thus for consistency we expect students to use Chrome (plus it has some very useful web development tools!).

Woohoo! 🎊