Part 2. Installing VS Code

Download and Install

We will be doing all of our code development on a text editor called Visual Studio Code (or VS Code for short). VS Code is written by Microsoft on top of Electron. Electron is a free and open-source software framework. VS Code is a source-code editor that is also free to download and use. Click on the following links (in blue) to Download Visual Studio Code on the computer you will be using for your development. There are lots of resources online to help you install VS Code. But here is a link to help you Install VS Code on Windows. And here is a link that will help you Install VS Code on a Mac. And lastly, here is a link to help you Install VS Code on Linux. And once again, there is no link to help you install VS Code on Chrome OS (which is a misnomer) because despite the adamant claims of Chromebook manufacturers, Chrome OS is not a real operating system.

After VS Code is installed, we recommend installing two popular extensions (JS-Beautify and Live Server) that are also completely free to download and use. And we will show you how to do that and also how to use them if you don't already know how. We will also help you configure VS Code to simplify using it.

We generally recommend:

1. Hiding the Welcome Page on startup.
2. Turning on Auto Save.
3. Making sure that you use the Dark+ Color Theme, because all of the code examples in these website tutorials will be shown using this same color theme.

Of course, many of these settings are personal choices, but we wanted to use an easy set of configuration choices that would be best-suited for beginners.

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