What Do You Need to Use This Book?

An important tenet of pair programming is that it should accommodate a wide range of people and preferences. You should be able to pair-program with a partner who uses different tools than yours. That’s why this book emphasizes cross-platform solutions. Many of the tools we’ll discuss can be used from Mac, Linux, and even Windows. However, some of the tools favor certain platforms over others.

If you’re running on Mac or Linux, you’ll need to have a terminal-based editor installed. The examples we’ll use favor Vim, but Emacs or any other solution will work. You’ll also need a package manager, which is provided for you on most Linux systems, but you will need to install Homebrew on Mac OS X.^[3]

If you’re running Windows, you’ll need a shell environment that supports SSH. Two great options are PuTTY,^[4] a free implementation of SSH, and the Secure Shell plug-in for the Chrome browser.^[5]

Regardless of your operating system, you’ll need to install Vagrant, a virtual machine manager. Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to create virtual environments, so begin by downloading the VirtualBox installer from the Oracle site, and run it.^[6] To install Vagrant, download and install the binary package for your platform from the Vagrant website, and run it.^[7]

We can check that Vagrant was installed correctly by running the vagrant command like this:

We’ll use Vagrant throughout the book to create and configure pair-programming environments.

The next tool we’ll need is RubyGems, which comes preinstalled with many Linux distributions (including the one we’ll use with Vagrant) and even Mac OS X. You can check that it’s available on your system by running this command:

If the gem command does not work, you can install RubyGems with your system’s package manager. On Debian-based Linux systems, run this command:

On Windows, download and follow the instructions for RubyInstaller.^[8]

Those are the prerequisites, but there is one more thing you might want.