Technical requirements

To follow along, you'll just need a computer: macOS, Windows, or Linux are all adequate operating systems. You'll also want to create a Heroku account. Heroku is a cloud application platform we'll use to deploy Metabase at the end of the chapter. You can sign up for an account at https://www.heroku.com/.

Throughout this book, we'll be using a program called Git. Git is a version control system that helps track code changes in a project. Git has a high learning curve for beginners, and while we will not be covering any Git tutorials in this book, I intend to make the examples easy to follow. No prior knowledge of Git is required.

Often in this book, we'll use GitHub (https://github.com/) in conjunction with Git. GitHub is a code-hosting platform that relies heavily on the Git program. While Git helps you track changes to your code base, GitHub allows you to host that code online, so that others can access, edit, or contribute to...