Minimal Programming Kit

Hello Coders,

This page aims to help beginners to set up their PC for writing code by installing and set up a minimal programming kit. All recommended tools and libraries are free, stable, and widely used even by experienced programmers and designers. In the end, we will build a popular open-source project using the downloaded tools.

Thanks for reading! Regarding the content, feel free to AMA in the comments section or contact me in private for a 30min free session.

• A modern editor - VSCode or Atom
• Nodejs - used in Javascript-based products and tools
• Yarn - a popular package manager for NodeJS (better than NPM)
• Python - a modern script language used for many types of projects
• GIT - a command-line tool used to download sources from Github
• Gulp - a toolkit to automate repetitive tasks

VSCode

We need this software to visualize and edit the sources, execute our projects and investigate the issues that might occur during the programming process.

• VSCode - official website
• VSCode - download page

Atom

A popular open-source text editor for developers with a modern UI, deeply customizable and fast.

Customization - It's easy to customize and style Atom. Tweak the look and feel of your UI with CSS/Less, and add major features with HTML and JavaScript.
Themeable - Atom comes pre-installed with four UI and eight syntax themes in both dark and light colors.

Github-ready - The GitHub package is already bundled with Atom - Create new branches, stage and commit, push and pull, resolve merge conflicts, view pull requests, and more—all from within your editor.

• Atom - official website
• Atom - Github repository

NodeJS

Installing NodeJS unlocks access to a huge ecosystem that exposes many tools and libraries we can use in our projects:

• For coding web pages: React, Vue, Svelte
• Backend: Express, Fastify, Koa
• Tools: Gulp, Webpack

To get started with Node please access the official website and download a version compatible with your operating system.

• NodeJS - official website
• NodeJS - download page

Yarn

Yarn is a package manager that doubles down as project manager. Whether you work on one-shot projects or large monorepos, as a hobbyist or an enterprise user, we've got you covered.

In other words, Yarn is a replacer for NPM commands as shown below:

$ npm install
// OR
$ yarn

Execution task

$ npm run start
// OR 
$ yarn start

Yarn uses an optimized workflow for fetching packages by using a local package (when available). For more information please access the project HOMEpage:

• Yarn - official website
• NPM vs Yarn - a comprehensive comparison

Python

Python is a general-purpose coding language—which means that, unlike HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it can be used for other types of programming and software development besides web development. Python is interpreted, easy to learn surrounded by a huge ecosystem, actively supported and used in many industries and domains. Can be used for things like (starting from the simple ones):

• Basic programming: using strings, adding numbers, open files
• Writing system scripts (creating instructions that tell a computer system to “do” something)
• Back end (or server-side) web and mobile app development
• Desktop apps and software development
• Processing big data and performing mathematical computations

Python can be downloaded from the official website. Choose the installer for your operating system, download, and click a few times.

Check installed version using the terminal

$ python --version
Python 3.7.2 <-- Installed Python Version

GIT

Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Using GIT we can clone/download and manage projects from Github and BitBucket with ease.

• GIT - official website
• GIT - download page

To check the installation, feel free to open a terminal and type git --version:

$ git --version
git version 2.28.0.windows 

Build a Sample Project

To make this short tutorial useful, we will build in the local environment a popular open-source project from Creative-Tim: Material Kit (free version) with a few commands typed in the terminal. Material Kit is a Free Bootstrap 4 UI Kit with a fresh, new design inspired by Google's material design.

• Material Kit - product page
• Material Kit - LIVE Demo

To build locally this product, we will follow up a simple setup: clone the sources from the public repository (Github), install modules and start the template.

Step #1 - Clone the sources

$ git clone https://github.com/creativetimofficial/material-kit.git
$ cd material-kit

Step #2 - Install project dependencies (this might take a while)

$ npm install

Step #3 - Start the project

$ npm run start

If all goes well, we should see Material Kit starter running in the browser:

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts in the comments. For more resources and projects, please access:

• Free React Dashboards - a curated list
• Open-source Dashboards - projects crafted in Flask and Django