Set up your development environment with Visual Studio Code to streamline your coding workflow and improve your learning experience. This article explains why using Visual Studio Code is highly recommended for following along with the course and how to open and navigate the curriculum files effectively.
Key Insights
- Visual Studio Code is recommended for its intuitive interface, strong AI integration, and wide range of extensions, making it suitable for both beginners and experienced developers.
- Using the same editor as the course instructor ensures a consistent interface, which simplifies following along and reduces potential confusion during exercises.
- Students using Visual Studio Code will receive more effective technical support from Noble Desktop, as instructors can provide clearer guidance and understand issues through consistent screenshots and environment setup.
This lesson is a preview from our Data Analytics Certificate Online (includes software). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
We're now going to open our class files, write some code in, and then execute that code. Now, to do that, the very first thing is to open it in Visual Studio Code. Now, if you don't want to use Visual Studio Code, it certainly won't make you.
However, there's a lot of great benefits to using Visual Studio Code. Number one, it's an amazing editor. It's the most popular text editor for code, for good reason.
It's great for getting you started. It's a great experience right outside of the box. It's highly configurable, and it's got great AI integration.
It's got amazing extensions. It's used by people getting started, and it's used by people who are veterans who've been coding for years. It's a great text editor.
The other reason to use Visual Studio Code for you is so that everything that you are seeing on my screen will be the same thing that you see on your screen, minus the minor fact that I've changed the colors a little bit. Otherwise, it's going to be the exact same interface, and therefore it'll be much easier for you to follow along in this course. The third reason is that if you do get stuck with something and you need some tech support from our course, we can give it to you more easily if you're using Visual Studio Code.
We'll be able to give you screenshots. You'll be able to understand. We'll be able to understand your screenshots, and we'll be able to walk you through any problem just with a lot less friction, a lot less with us trying to learn what tool you're using in order to help you.
So help us help you. Those are three really good reasons to use Visual Studio Code. It's not mandatory, but highly recommended.
Okay. So launch Visual Studio Code, installing it first if you don't have it. And now what we're going to do is open up our curriculum folder.
You'll go to the File menu in Visual Studio Code and choose Open Folder. Now you're going to navigate to your Downloads folder, or if you put the folder somewhere else there, the Data Visualization Curriculum main, and you're not going to try to click through to any files. You want Data Visualization Curriculum main selected.
And then you're going to choose Open in the lower right-hand corner, or on Windows it says Select Folder. You'll know you opened the whole folder when under Explorer over here on the upper left, it says Data Visualization Curriculum main. It also should list any notebooks we have here.
We're going to start with Notebook 1. You can click this little arrow to open it up and see what files or other folders are in this folder. What we want is the app.py file, which right now doesn't have anything in it, but we'll take care of that shortly. Now to make sure that we have enough space for our code, I like to collapse this file pane.
We're going to be working with app.py for a while. We don't need to be able to see what other files there are currently. So up here, this little file and folder icon, and it says Explore.
If you simply click on it, it collapses that. Of course, you could bring it back if you ever need to, just by clicking on that part in the upper left. In our next part, we will write some code and run it.