Minimal Programming Kit
A short-list with tools for beginners and simple setup to build an open-source project.
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A short-list with tools for beginners and simple setup to build an open-source project.
Last updated
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This page aims to help beginners to set up their PC for programming. All recommended tools 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.
The Short-list
Nodejs - used in Javascript-based products and tools
Python - a modern script language used for many types of projects
Gulp - a toolkit to automate repetitive tasks
Note: For support regarding this tutorial please access the AppSeed platform or join the community on Discord.
We need this software to visualize and edit the sources, execute our projects and investigate the issues that might occur during the programming process.
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.
Installing NodeJS unlocks access to a huge ecosystem that exposes many tools and libraries we can use in our projects:
To get started with Node please access the official website and download a version compatible with your operating system
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:
Execution task
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 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.
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.
To check the installation, feel free to open a terminal and type git --version:
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 amazing product, we will follow up a simple setup: clone the sources from the public repository (Github), install modules and start the template. Let's go!
Step #1 - Clone the sources
Step #2 - Install project dependencies (this might take a while)
Step #3 - Start the project
If all goes well, we shoould see Material Kit starter running in the browser:
Links & Resources
Free React Dashboards - a curated list published on Dev.to
Open-source Dashboards provided by AppSeed
