To write HTML5 and JavaScript code, you need a text editor, a browser, and, sometimes, a web server (it can be locally hosted on your personal desktop).
The text editors we recommend for Windows are PSPad, TextPad or EditPlus (but you can use Notepad if you have to). The text editors we recommend for Mac are TextWrangler, TextMate or TextEdit. If you’re on a Linux system, you’ve got plenty of text editors built in, and we trust you don’t need us to tell you about them.
We hope you’ve got the browser bit covered and have installed at least two browsers (see the previous page). If not, do it now. It’s also worth your time to learn how to use the browser developer tools; each of the major browsers has built-in tools you can use to inspect the JavaScript console (you can see errors as well as output you display using console.log, a handy alternative to alert), web storage usage, the DOM, CSS style that’s been applied to elements, and much much more. Some browsers even have plug-ins for additional developer tools. You don’t need the developer tools to get through the book, but if you’re willing to spend the time to investigate how to use these, it will make development easier.
Some HTML5 features and JavaScript APIs require that you serve files from a real web server rather than by loading a file (i.e., your URL will start with http:// rather than file://). We’ve identified which examples you’ll need a server for in the appropriate places in the book, but if you’re motivated, we recommend you go ahead and install a server on your computer now. For Mac and Linux, Apache comes built-in, so you’ll just need to make sure you know how to access it and where to put your files so you can serve them using your local server. For Windows, you’ll need to install Apache or IIS; if you go the Apache route, there are plenty of open source tools like WAMP and XAMPP that are fairly easy to