You need the following software for this course. It's all free!
Web Browser
Your pages should look roughly the same in any current Web browser like Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, or Firefox. But you should use Chrome for this course for two very important reasons. I will be viewing your pages in Chrome, so if you test them in Chrome, they should look exactly the same to me. Chrome has very good built-in tools to aid developers which I will show in class at the appropriate times.
Chrome (Windows or Mac) - popular Web browser from Google. If you already have Chrome, make sure your version is current.
Code Editor
You may not use a WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage in this course. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is basically a Word processor that creates Web pages.
You must use a plain text code editor to create your Web pages. Any plain text code editor that provides colored syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, and JavScript should suffice. Some good free ones are listed below.
BBEdit (Mac only) - This is the editor I'm using in class. After the free trial version expires, it still has all the features you need.
Atom (Windows or Mac) - This is a new-ish free editor that's gaining in popularity, although it's a bit more complicated to use than the above two.
FTP Client
There are several free apps built for making connections to remote servers for the purpose of transferring files from your local computer to the server. Such apps are commonly called FTP Clients, where FTP refers to File Transfer Protocol.
The following page has several download links on the left side. Two of them will take you to the Windows or Apple Stores, where they will try to charge you for Cyberduck. The other download buttons will download Cyberduck for free.
NOTE: The software is free, but if it asks for donations you are obviously under no obligation whatsoever.
NOTE only for Mac computers: When you install it, uncheck the box for also installing bonjour bookmarks. It's harmless, but annoying. If you forget this and start getting notifications at the top right of your screen every time it detects public ftp servers, then turn off the notifications: System Preferences --> Notifications --> Cyberduck