For web programming, it is important to use a browser that has a good set of tools to help you track down errors and write JavaScript code. The best browser for this in my opinion is Google Chrome (or Chromium if on Linux). The lessons will assume that if you are doing things outside of CodeSandbox, you are using Chrome or Chromium as your browser. Here is the link to download Google Chrome. Double-clicking on the installer file (ChromeSetup.exe) and accepting all the defaults is fine for the installation.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a very good editor for programming and is widely used by professional programmers. Luckily, it is free to download and use. Here is the link to get the installer for VS Code. Select the download for Windows 10,11.

Look in your Downloads folder and double click on the VSCodeUserSetup0x64-1.103.2.exe file that you just downloaded. Note that the numbers after x64 could be different as this was the file that I downloaded on 9/7/25. Check the I accept the agreement and click Next. Keep clicking Next until you see the window showing Select Additional Tasks. Check the box Create a desktop icon. Then, click Next.

Then, click Install. This will install VS Code for your user account. This is why we wanted the Desktop icon as that will make it easier to launch VS Code. When the installation is done, you can click on Finish and this will start up VS Code.

Here is a screen shot showing the Desktop icons for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and VS Code:

The next screen shot shows VS Code opened. I have selected the Choose your theme button and am about to selec the Light Modern theme.

After choosing the Light Modern theme, this is what VS Code looks like on my desktop:

This is easier to see in screen shots, and works better for my eyes. But, the theme is your preference, so choose what works for you.

Node.js and the Node package manager (npm) are essential tools for learning about web programming. This will be especially true when we eventually get to creating connections to a backend database for a more complex web application. Go to the following site, Node.js download and click on the button labeled Windows Installer (.msi). You need to scroll down past the top section that gets Node.js using Docker and npm.

This installer (msi file) needs to be installed with administrator privileges. But, this will make Node.js and npm available for all users in any folder. When the file (node-v24.7.0-x64.msi) is finished downloading, go to your Downloads folder and double-click on it. Click Next, accept the agreement and click Next. The default location to install will be C:\Program Files\nodejs\. This is fine, so click Next. Click Next again to accept the default features. Check the box Automatically install the necessary tools. Note that this will also install Chocolatey. The script will pop-up in a new window after the installation completes. After checking that box, click Next. Finally, click Install. You will be prompted to enter the administrator password and you must select Yes. Click Finish. Then, the box to install Chocolatey, Python and VS build tools will pop up. Press any key to continue.

Press any key to continue a second time. You will again be prompted to enter the adminisstrator password and click Yes. This will install Chocolatey, then Python. To test that Node.js and npm are installed, we need to open a command prompt. In the Search box next to the Windows start button, type CMD. This should bring up Command Prompt. Right-click on this and when the menu pops up, select Pin to taskbar.

After pinning the command prompt to the taskbar, you should see this:

If you click on the command prompt icon in the taskbar, the command prompt will pop up. I changed the appearance of my command prompt by right-clicking in the title bar of the command prompt and selecting Settings. Once the Settings tab opened, I clicked on the Defaults profile, then clicked on Appearance in Additional settings.

Then, I changed the Color scheme to One Half Light and the Font size to 16.

Now, I can check to make sure that Node.js and npm are installed. Here is how I check in the command prompt:

As you can see Node.js version 24.7.0 and npm version 11.5.1 were installed.

We will install some Node packages later on, when it is needed for a lesson. But for now, this is the main setup for learning web programming using Windows 11 with administrative privileges.

When you don’t have admin privileges, you download Google Chrome, the same way, but you install it differently. Start by going to this site Chrome and click on the Download Chrome button. If you wait the file ChromeSetup.exe will be downloaded to your Downloads folder. Double-click on this file but when the User Account Control (UAC) dialog pops up asking to allow modifying your computer, select No.

The installer will proceed to install Google Chrome as a regular user. It will download files from the Internet and install inside a hidden folder called AppData inside the user’s folder. The user’s folder can be found at C:\Users\<username> where <username> is the username of that user. In completing the installation, the installer will create an icon on the Desktop so that you can launch it by double-clicking on that icon.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is straightforward to install without admin privileges. Start by going to this site: Download Visual Studio Code. Click on the button Windows Windows 10,11 that is the first button for Windows on that page. This will download the installer file VSCodeUserSetup-x64-1.103.2.exe. The actual version (1.103.2) could be different as you may get an updated version.

If you are logged in as a regular user, the VS Code installer will just install to the hidden AppData folder inside your home directory. So, for example, if your username is student, this folder will be C:\Users\student\AppData. The installer sets up the PATH environment variable so that you can run VS Code without any issues.

Next to the Start button, use the Search to enter VS. The Visual Studio Code app will be displayed as the best match. Click on the drop-down list for this app to display a menu that allows pinning this app to your taskbar.

On that drop-down list, click on Pin to taskbar.

If you click on that, VS Code will show up in your taskbar so it can easily be launched. I opened VS Code by clicking on this and I changed my theme to Light Modern:

Start by going to the site: Node.js Download Node.js. Scroll down until you see the Standalone Binary(.zip) link, and click on that.

This will download a .zip file that has the executable file that can run Node.js. Right-click on this file in your Downloads folder and select Extract All. This will create a folder inside a folder. Here is a partial screen shot in Windows Explorer showing the important file structure:

This would means the path to the folder that we want to use would be:
C:\Users\student\Downloads\node-v22.19.0-win-x64\node-v22.19.0-win-x64

That is a long path, so let’s move that folder to the student folder. Using Windows Explorer, just drag the folder that was highlighted in the last screen shot to the student folder. Here is what this would look like:

Note that you can see the contents in that folder including files like node.exe. Now the path for the folder location would be:

This will make it easier to adjust the environment variables to include this folder in the PATH. We start by going to the Search next to the Start button and typing 'environ'. This will bring up the best match of Edit the system environment variables. Click on the Open link.

This will cause the User Account Control (UAC) box, to which you reply No. The reason why the UAC box pops up, is that there are two sets of environment variables. The system environment variables affects all users of the computer. The other set, the user environment variables only affect the logged in user. That’s what we want to adjust, as we can edit the system environment variables without admin privileges. In the next screen shot, you can see the User variables for student with Path selected. You click the Edit button to modify the Path.

Note the System variables below the user variables. You can’t edit those without admin privileges. After you click on the Edit button for the Path variable, you will see the following dialog box pop up.

Click on the Browse button so that you can browse for the student\node-v22.19.0-win-x64 folder. When you find this folder and click OK, you will see that folder added to the path. Click OK to save the changes to the Path.

Click OK again to exit the Environmental Variables dialog box. To test this out, we need to go to the command prompt. Let’s review how to add the command prompt to the taskbar. Go to the Search on the side of the Start button and type 'CMD'. When the best match shows up, select Pin to taskbar.

Now that the command prompt is on the taskbar, click on it. I modified the Settings by right-clicking on the title bar of the command prompt dialog and selected Settings. Then, I click on the Defaults profile and under Additional settings, I click on Appearance.

I modified the Appearance by changing to the One Half Light color scheme, and increasing the Font size to 16. Then, I clicked the Save button.

The following shows a screen shot of the command prompt after the changes in appearance were made. In addition, the command prompt shows that node and npm are available.

Okay, those are the main things to set up for a Windows 11 computer without admin privileges.

Run these commands to install Node.js and npm using nvm.

Then, you can check to see that Node.js and npm are installed.

That’s all we need to get started on learning basics of web programming on a Mac without having admin privileges. We will install various Node.js packages when we need them for some of the lessons.