An integrated development environment (IDE) has the ability to greatly help or hinder development. Depending on the specific goals of a project, an IDE could prove extremely easy to integrate into a workflow or simply get in the way. IDEs are designed to have a small learning curve and will often offer an easy way to build solutions from existing drivers and middleware.
In this chapter, we'll be discussing how to select an IDE, taking a look at the different types of IDEs, and selecting one to use to create all of the source code you'll find in the code pack used in this book.
Here's a quick list of the main topics we will cover:
- The IDE selection criteria
- Platform-abstracted IDEs
- Open source/free IDEs
- Proprietary IDEs
- Selecting the IDE for this book
