There are plenty of options available when it comes to selecting basic development tools such as text editors or IDEs, version control software, and even the development workspace itself. In this section, we go over options and recommendations relevant to web development with MERN so you can make informed decisions when selecting these tools based on individual preferences.
Developing on a local machine is the most common practice among programmers, but with the advent of good cloud development services, such as Cloud9 (https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/?origin=c9io), it's now possible to use either or both. You can set up your local workspace with MERN technologies, and this will be assumed to be the case in the rest of the book, but you can also choose to run and develop the code in the cloud services that come equipped for Node development.