Every good toolman has a good toolbox. Monkey's toolbox is small but well-equipped. It is basically a combination of two tools and some accessories. The first tool is TRANS, the source code translator. It is responsible for transforming/translating your Monkey source code into code, which can be compiled for each target platform. Basically, you feed it with one programming language and it spills out your code in a different programming language.
The second tool is Monk, the in-built source code editor for Monkey. You can also use other code editors as well, but we will work with Monk in this book, and it wouldn't hurt for you to do the same. A great benefit is that your Monkey installation includes all the source code for the tools, modules, and other stuff. So, if you happen to own a license for BlitzMAX (another programming language) and know what you are doing with it, then you could add features to Monk yourself or change it according to your needs.
The same thing goes for TRANS; you could change it as per your needs. The good thing is that you don't need another programming language. TRANS is self-compiling.
The accessories are Monkey's source code modules. They provide you with all the needed functionality for your games. We will learn more about this module, later on.