What you need for this book

All of the tools and services used in this book are available for free online. Most of the worked examples require an active web connection at some point. To get started, you need nothing more than a console, a web browser, and permission to install new software on your machine. To support developers coming from a .NET background, some of the console listings or example steps in this book use Windows conventions (for example, backslashes in paths). None of the examples depend on Windows specifically though. You can work through this book on Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux.