Hello new student!

If you've never written a line of code before, this course may catch you off guard as I start assuming you've previously ran a create-react-app!

You need a few things:

1) Node.js - Allows you to run JavaScript on your computer. You typically just download this from their website, and then you can run node commands (like npm/yarn) from your terminal.

Install here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

2) Yarn - A package manager which helps you install other tools (aka packages, which are just folders filled with JavaScript code) on your computer. These packages can give you new commands to run, or access new tools and libraries inside your web application. It is the same thing as npm, but yarn is faster and makes sure you never download the same package twice. You don't actually need Yarn. You can use npm instead, but the course uses Yarn.

Install yarn here: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install#mac-stable

From here, we should have all the commands we need to install the create-react-app command on our computer. So you should check out the official documentation on how to install create-react-app here. https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

3) create-react-app - A package which gives you the ability to run the create-react-app command. Once you have this installed, you can run it from your Terminal to create a new React.js project.

4) Text Editor / IDE like Webstorm or Sublime Text - Where you'll be writing your code. I use Webstorm because it has a ton of great features (autocomplete on HTML elements, built-in terminal, JavaScript hinting). But you can use Sublime Text or Atom if you are looking for a less expensive editor. Ultimately, you're just modifying files, so it's more of a personal preference.

So to summarize, you download Node.js, install the create-react-app package globally on your computer through npm or Yarn, and using your Terminal and Text Editor, run the command to build your React project, and then open and modify files with your Text Editor.

This is all part of "setting up our development environment". You should Google everything here, watch Youtube videos, read articles, and try to learn how developers set up their environment. It is a very common conversation topic among web developers, and all these tools are very standard, I'm not doing anything unique or special with my setup.

So, part of the job is being resourceful and learning on your own, and so you should try to learn these tools from multiple sources. At the same time, while the setup is important, its just a means of creating and modifying files on your computer.

The learning never ends here! Let me know if you have any questions.

-react.school