Getting Up and Running

In this chapter, we will cover the necessary steps to set up your development environment. These will include the following:

• Installing Node.js on your machine
• Installing MongoDB on your machine
• Verifying that everything is set up properly

Follow these sections carefully, as we need the development environment to be up and running before we jump into the chapters where we dive into actual coding. For the remainder of this book, it's going to be assumed that you are using either a Mac with OS X, Linux, or Windows 7/Windows 8. You will also need super user and/or administrator privileges on the computer, as you will be installing the Node and MongoDB server. The code and examples after this chapter will all be OS agnostic and should work in any environment, assuming you have taken the steps I outlined earlier to be prepared ahead of time.

You will need a proper text editor to write and edit the code. While any text editor you choose will serve this purpose, choosing a better text editor will hugely improve your productivity. Sublime Text 3 appears to be the most popular text editor, regardless of the platform, at this moment. It is a simple, lightweight editor with unlimited plugins made available by developers around the world. If you are on a Windows machine, then Notepad++ is also a good candidate. Also, there are JavaScript-based open source editors such as Atom and Brackets, which are also worth a try.

Finally, you're going to need access to the command line. Linux and Mac have access to the command line via the terminal program. A great alternative on the Mac is iTerm2 (http://iterm2.com). For Windows, the default command-line program works but isn't the best. A great alternative there is ConEmu (http://conemu.codeplex.com).

For the remainder of this book, any time I reference a command line or command prompt, it will look like the following:

$ command -parameters -etc