The overarching goal of this book is to give you the tools and know-how needed to efficiently construct modern, cross-platform solutions for your users. In this chapter, we will focus on the tools themselves, showing you how to bootstrap your development environment to tackle the challenges that we have in store for you in the remainder of the book. We will also give you a brief introduction to each tool in order to give you an idea about why they fit into your toolchain. If any such detail seems unclear at this point, do not worry. We will delve into everything you need to know about each tool in the relevant parts of the book.

After reading this chapter, you will know how to install, configure, and use the fundamental software components that we will use throughout this book. You will also have a good understanding of why these tools are appropriate for the development of modern apps.