Setup, writing structured text, and file management
First things first: we’re going to get ourselves set up and organized:
- We’re going to install some software on our machines that we will be using throughout the course.
- We’ll use the tools that you can use for editing text and transforming it into other formats, and
- We’ll look at some strategies that you can use to organize your files.
You may be doing a lot of programming in COMP
1010 (or COMP
1012) and COMP
1020, but you’re also going to be expected to do a lot of
writing in computer science. In some cases that’s going to be
to describe how someone else should run your work (e.g., a
“README”). In some cases your writing is going to
be the work. In some cases you’re going to be writing to
communicate with your peers and teammates (both in school and in the
workplace).
In this topic, we will be looking at Markdown and \LaTeX for writing structured text, a tool called Pandoc for sharing and distributing that text in formats like PDF and Word, getting you set up with VS Code, and trying to establish some practices for organizing your files into a folder structure.