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Literally the only thing you need to start playing with JavaScript is a browser. If you’re on Google Chrome, simply hit CMD/CTRL-Shift-J on your keyboard and your browser will open the developer tools console. You can type JavaScript into this console and it will output results. Try it. Type something like 1 + 2 in the console and you’ll see 3 printed out.
Of course, eventually you’ll want to save JavaScript files. So besides a browser, a command line terminal is very useful. You will have one on your computer already. Then you need a plain text editor. Popular editors include Sublime and Atom, but even something as simple as Notepad will do (but programs like Word or Docs aren’t useful because they are not plain text - that is, they can embed other information besides text into the file). That’s pretty much all you need to begin learning JavaScript and web programming.
You can also try sites like jsbin.com and codepen.com which allow you to write HTML (which provides the structure of a website), CSS (which allows styling of a site), and JavaScript (which provides interactivity on the web) into a virtual sandbox and see the output. They’re very helpful for playing around with new features or debugging code.
Of course, eventually you’ll want to save JavaScript files. So besides a browser, a command line terminal is very useful. You will have one on your computer already. Then you need a plain text editor. Popular editors include Sublime and Atom, but even something as simple as Notepad will do (but programs like Word or Docs aren’t useful because they are not plain text - that is, they can embed other information besides text into the file). That’s pretty much all you need to begin learning JavaScript and web programming.
You can also try sites like jsbin.com and codepen.com which allow you to write HTML (which provides the structure of a website), CSS (which allows styling of a site), and JavaScript (which provides interactivity on the web) into a virtual sandbox and see the output. They’re very helpful for playing around with new features or debugging code.