---
title: Introduction
author: Franklin Bristow
---

Introduction
============

First things first: we're going to get ourselves set up and organized. We'll
first take a look at some tools that you can use for editing text, and we'll
look at some strategies that you can use to organize your files.

Despite the amount of programming you've done in COMP 1010 and COMP 1020, you're
also going to be expected to do a lot of *writing* in computer science. In some
cases that's going to be to describe how to compile or run your work. In some
cases your writing is going to *be* the work. In some cases you're going to be
writing to communicate with your peers and teammates (both in school and in the
workplace).

We'll spend some time this week looking at [Markdown] and $\LaTeX$ for writing
structured text, and a tool called [Pandoc] for sharing and distributing that
text in formats like PDF and Word.

::: outcomes

* [ ] Install software on your personal computer (e.g., `pandoc` and VS Code).
* [ ] Write plain text documents (including code and formulas) using structured
  markup formats (Markdown and $\LaTeX$).
* [ ] Convert plain text documents to different formats (e.g., `docx`).
* [ ] Define your own strategy for organizing your files.
* [ ] Build a directory structure with a visual file explorer for the purpose of
  organizing your files.

:::

[Markdown]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
[Pandoc]: https://pandoc.org