Introduction

First things first: we’re going to get ourselves set up and organized:

1. We’re going to install some software on our machines that we will be using throughout the course.
2. We’ll use the tools that you can use for editing text and transforming it into other formats, and
3. 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. 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.