Meteor's requirements
Meteor is not just a JavaScript framework and server. As we saw earlier, it is also a command-line tool that has a whole build process for us in place.
Currently, the operating systems that are officially supported are as follows:
- Mac OS X 10.6 and above
- Linux x86 and x86_64 systems
- Windows
Note
The Windows installer is still in development at the time of writing this book. Please follow the wiki page at https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Preview-of-Meteor-on-Windows.
This book and all examples use Meteor 1.0.
Using Chrome's developer tools
We will also need Google Chrome or Firefox with the Firebug add-on installed to follow examples that require a console. The examples, screenshots, and explanations in this book will use Google Chrome's developer tools.
Using Git and GitHub
I highly recommend using GitHub when working with web projects, such as the one we will work on in this book. Git and GitHub help us to back up our progress and let us always go back to previous states while seeing what we've changed.
Git is a version control system, which was created in 2005 by the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds.
With Git, we can commit any state of our code and later go back to that exact state. It also allows multiple developers to work on the same code base and merge their results together in an automated process. If conflicts appear in this process, the merging developer is able to resolve those merge conflicts by removing the unwanted lines of code.
I also recommend registering an account at http://github.com, as this is the easiest way to browse our code history. They have an easy to use interface as well as a great Windows and Mac app.
To follow the code examples in this book, you can download all code examples for each chapter from the book's web page at https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support/17713.
Additionally, you will be able to clone the book's code from http://github.com/frozeman/book-building-single-page-web-apps-with-meteor. Every tag in this repository equals to one chapter of the book and the commit history will help you to see the changes, which were made in each chapter.
