Installing CoffeeScript
The CoffeeScript compiler is written in CoffeeScript. That presents a chicken-and-egg problem: how do we run the compiler on a system that doesn’t already have the CoffeeScript compiler? If only there were some way to run JavaScript on your machine without a web browser and give that code access to the local file system.…
Ah, but there is: Node.js! If you haven’t used Node before, don’t worry about it; you’ll learn more about it in Chapter 6, Web Servers with Node and Express. For now, all you need to know is that Node is a bridge between JavaScript code and your operating system.
The rest of this section will be about installing Node and npm, which we need in order to use CoffeeScript’s official coffee compiler. But ...
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