To begin your journey, we first require the necessary tools to go about learning how to program. One of the most important tools would be using Visual Studio Code, a free, lightweight and powerful code editor developed by Microsoft.
In this guide we will cover : Installing and first time setup, a brief overview of the UI of Visual Studio Code, how to open folders, edit files and run your code, and finally useful extensions / extra tools that will make your experience a little easier.
First and foremost, we need to download and install Visual Studio Code, we do this by visiting the official website for visual studio : https://code.visualstudio.com/, then navigate to the downloads page and you will be presented with the following :
Here, on the downloads page you will be presented with three choices, depending on which Operating System your computer is running, select the one that matches your computer (Windows, Linux or Mac). Once you have downloaded the correct installer, you should be able to open the installer on your device and then follow the on screen instructions to install.
Once completed, and you have opened the application, you should be greeted with the following screen :
From here, we could start working on our projects, however, to make your workflow a bit easier it’s highly recommended that we install a few extensions to improve our quality of life while working in VSCode :
A few good examples would be to install the extension for language support for your main coding language (Python, JavaScript, C/C++, etc.), Code Snippets, which helps with syntax and development of code, Bracket Pair Colorizer which colour codes your brackets to make them easier to keep track of, and of course, a Theme to personalize your VSCode to your liking. There are a plethora of extensions to be used, make sure to do your research and utilize them accordingly.
Now that we have VSCode appropriately set up, we can go about starting our projects. We go about this by opening a project folder, VSCode is designed to work with project folders, to open a project folder, go to the File > Open Folder option.
Then a window should pop up asking which folder you would like to open, you can either create a new folder or select an existing folder. For example, we opened a project folder where it would be easier to access the content needed to make progress in the bootcamp.
Now we should be good to go, creating Python, JavaScript, HTML or CSS files to create our projects. Happy Coding!