Install Node.js and Visual Studio Code (VSC)

Before we wrap up this section and dive into GraphQL, there are two things we're going to have to have installed on our computers. The first is Node.js, which you can find at Nodejs.org. Since knowing Node is a pre-req for this class, hopefully you already have it installed on your computer. If you don't have node installed or you're using a much older version, just go ahead and grab V8 of Node or higher. You can grab the installer, run through it by clicking next a bunch of times and then you'll be all done. The exact version of Node you use with this class does not matter. All of the GraphQL functionality that we're going to be exploring comes from specific modules which we'll be installing later. We just need a semi-modern version of Node to get the environment up and running. V8 of Node or Greater is going to work perfectly fine. So V8 nine, ten or whatever else comes out in the future. So run through that installer, make sure you have node installed and if you do, we can move on to the second tool, which is going to be a text editor. As always, you are more than welcome to use whatever text editor you're comfortable with. If you're interested in following along and setting up your environment just like mine, I'm going to be using Visual Studio code. You can find that over at code dot Visual studio.com. If you haven't used it before, I recommend giving it a shot. It's a fantastic editor that integrates really well with all sorts of environments, including GraphQL. Visual Studio Code is free, it's open source and it's available for all operating systems. So if you do want to use it, go ahead and grab the installer and get it installed. We're going to wrap up this video by going over the plugins I'll be using for VSC in this class. Now some of these plugins will have replacements in other editors, but I can't guarantee that. So here's the plugin list I'm using for Visual Studio code. I got about half a dozen or so that really come in handy. The first one, Babel S6, S7 just gives us support for all of those modern features like arrow functions and async await. The next plug in, beautify allows us to format our code on the fly. After that, we have Docker, which is going to come in handy later in the course when we worry about deploying our applications. After that, I have duplicate action. This is a simple one that allows me to right click files or folders to duplicate them inside of the file tree. After that I have GraphQL for Visual Studio code. I definitely recommend installing this one as it's going to give us syntax highlighting for the GraphQL code that we're going to be writing very soon. After that I have NPM and NPM IntelliSense, which just gives me better support when working with NPM modules, something we will be doing in this class. Then I have sublime text keymap. I use that because I really fell in love with the sublime text keyboard shortcuts. I had a really hard time switching to some of the Visual Studio code defaults. This one, like all of these, is completely optional, but if you do like the sublime text keyboard shortcuts, it's a great tool. Last up word count just counts the words in a markdown file. Nothing fancy there. So these are all the plugins I'll be using throughout the class. If you have node installed and a text editor installed, you are ready to dive in to the next section where we're actually going to start learning about GraphQL. I am super excited to get to it, so stay tuned and I will see you then.