Setting up tools and getting started!
It is important to get the foundation right before installing anything else. Depending on your operating system, install Node.js and its package manager, npm. You can find a detailed installation manual on the Node.js official website, at https://nodejs.org/en/.
Tip
Ensure that both Node.js and npm are installed globally (they are accessible system wide) and have the right permissions.
At the time of writing this book, npm comes with Node.js out-of-the-box. However, in case their policy changes in the future, you can always download the npm and follow the installation process from https://npmjs.com.
The next stop would be the IDE; feel free to choose anything that you are comfortable with. Even a simple text editor will do. In this book, I will use WebStorm because of its embedded TypeScript syntax support and Angular features, which speeds up the development process. Moreover, it is lightweight enough to handle the project we are about to develop. You can download it from https://jetbrains.com/webstorm/download.
During the first few chapters, we will use simple objects and arrays as placeholders for the data. However, at some stage, we will need to persist the data in our application. This means we need a database. In this book we are going to use Firebase Realtime Database. It is a free NoSQL cloud database provided by Google which come with whatever we need from a real-time and secure database.
For now, just leave the database subject. You don't need to create any connections or database objects for the first few chapters. We will revisit this later in Chapter 4, The Rating Service - Data Management.
