What you need for this book

To write code, all you really need is a text editor, but for serious development you'll need to use an IDE (Integrated Developer Environment). We use Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and C++ in this book using a Windows computer but, the concepts taught can be used within any programming language as well. For those of you that do not have Visual Studio installed, but are using Windows we do go over how to install the free Visual Studio Community version and set it up with our project in Chapter 1, Introduction to Design Patterns.