Notes for Windows Users

This book assumes a Unix-like development environment. This is sometimes a bit tricky to set up if you're new to web development and you use Windows. (Macs run Unix, and Linux machines work very much like Unix, so those systems are a little more of a "natural" fit for this kind of work.)

However, in recent years there has been some great strides in improving the web development environment setup for Windows 10. In fact, Microsoft has released the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which makes it very convenient to work with Unix-based tools.

It is completely worthwhile to follow the steps in the Official Guide to WSL published by Microsoft in order to set up a comfortable and useful development environment. We spend a lot of time using command line tools as web developers, so the more comfortable you can get with this environment, the better off you will be.

Notes for Pre-Windows 10 Users

If you are using a version of Windows before Windows 10, and you cannot upgrade, then you might need to look into some other tools for making your command line environment more comfortable.

You might consider installing the CMDER tool, which adds a lot of functionality to the default Windows command line terminal. This includes basic Unix commands that are missing by default from Windows as well as nicer coloring and prompts so you can have a more effective interface.

If you are using CMDER for your terminal, then you may need to do a little extra setup to make Git work on the command line with your SSH Keys. This article covers that setup quite well, so you should probably read it. (Please note: This is a link to an archived version of the article, which is still relevant, but no longer hosted on the original site.)