You need four things for this course, and you probably have three of them already.

A Paid Claude Plan

Claude Code is not included in the free Claude plan. A free account can sign in, but it cannot start a session.

Any paid plan works: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise. As of October 2026, Pro costs $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly. Max starts at $100 a month and gives five or twenty times the usage of Pro.

An Anthropic Console account with an API (application programming interface) key works too. Then we pay for every token instead of a monthly price.

Anthropic’s own figure for enterprise teams that pay this way is about $13 per developer per active day, so for a course like this, a plan is the cheaper option.

If you do not have a plan yet, get one before module 1. The install itself takes a minute, but nothing runs without the plan. Lesson 3.3 compares the plans and their limits in detail.

The .NET 10 SDK

We use the .NET 10 SDK (software development kit) for this course. You can download .NET 10 here.

To check what you have, open a terminal and run dotnet --version. We built the course on version 10.0.302. A newer patch version is fine.

From module 4 on, we also need the Entity Framework Core command-line tool, because we run database migrations. It is a separate tool, installed once per machine.

You can install it now with dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef, or wait until module 4, where Claude Code can install it for you.

Git

Claude Code itself runs without git, but this course needs it. From lesson 4.6 on, we commit the agent’s work and undo what we do not want, and module 9 works with branches and code review. Version 2.28 or later is fine. To check, run git --version.

On Windows, we recommend Git for Windows, because it also installs Git Bash. With Git Bash present, Claude Code can run a shell command through Git Bash or through PowerShell, and one session may use both. Without it, Claude Code uses PowerShell only. Both work.

You can download Git for Windows here, or install it from PowerShell:

winget install --id Git.Git -e --source winget

The winget command asks nothing. It installs with the defaults, and the git config lines below set the branch name and the editor. The installer from the website asks many questions. Keep its defaults, except on these three screens:

• “Choosing the default editor used by Git”. Git opens this editor when it needs a message from you. The default is Vim, which is hard to leave if you have never used it. Pick Notepad or Visual Studio Code.
• “Adjusting the name of the initial branch in new repositories”. Choose to override the default, and type main. Every lesson in this course uses main.
• “Adjusting your PATH environment”. Keep the recommended option, “Git from the command line and also from 3rd-party software”. It lets PowerShell and Claude Code find git.

On macOS and Linux, git usually comes with the system. If git --version finds nothing, install it with your package manager.

Then open a new terminal and tell git who you are. Git writes your name and email into every commit, and it refuses to make the first commit without them.

The last two lines set the branch name and the editor again, for a git you installed earlier or with winget. Pick the tab for your system:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
git config --global core.editor notepad

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
git config --global core.editor nano

Use your own name and email. The four lines print nothing. Only the last one differs between the tabs: Notepad comes with Windows, and nano with macOS and most Linux systems.

An Editor

Any editor you already like. We use Visual Studio Code in this course, but nothing depends on it. You can follow along in Visual Studio, Rider, or anything else.

Where Claude Code Runs

Claude Code is one program, and it runs in a terminal. That is how we use it in this course, because everything you learn in the terminal works everywhere else too.

If you are on Windows and you would rather not live in a terminal, there is a better option: the Claude Desktop app. Its Code tab runs the same Claude Code engine behind a normal window.

You pick a project folder, you type what you want, and you see the agent’s changes as diffs, its terminal, and your files, all side by side. You can run several sessions at once, one per tab.

In our opinion, it is the most user-friendly way to use Claude Code on Windows. It can also run next to the terminal version on the same machine, even on the same project.

Download it from claude.ai and sign in with the same plan. Everything in this course applies to it one to one. Only the window looks different.

Two more options exist for editor users:

• The Visual Studio Code extension. It is official, it shows the agent’s changes as inline diffs, and it uses the terminal built into the editor.
• The JetBrains plugin. It is official but still labelled beta. It runs the same command-line tool inside the IDE (integrated development environment) terminal, and adds diffs and diagnostics.

For Visual Studio there is no official extension. Two community extensions exist, and neither is supported by Anthropic.

Whichever one you choose, install the command-line tool once, in one way. Two copies of Claude Code on one machine is the most common cause of confusing problems, and we will see why in module 1.

Windows, macOS and Linux

Most of our readers work on Windows, so we write for Windows first, and everything in the course works on macOS and Linux too.

When a command is different on the two, the snippet has a tab for each, like the git config lines above. Lesson 0.5 explains how the tabs work, and module 1 covers the installation on all three systems.

If you have any problems with your setup, let us know. In the next lesson, we download the source code and build it once.