Requirements
Imaging: Adobe Photoshop CS5 or newer.
Make sure to look at the educational discounts provided to PSU students by http://techhead.org
Look at the new Adobe Creative Cloud which offers discounts for students as well and gives you access to all of the Adobe Creative Suite: https://creative.adobe.com/plans
Coding / Editing: Text Wrangler — This is an excellent, free text/html editor. You are free to use any editor but you should be sure to find one that provides color coded text.
FTP: FireFTP, FileZilla
A free FTP program with a two window format for clear, organized transferring of files.
Web Browser: Firefox (Safari / Chrome)
Firefox is still the most popular standards compliant browser available and it will be your benchmark for design and development of your web sites. However, your final project will require that your web site looks and functions correctly in all three of these browsers so be prepared to troubleshoot these issues.
Firefox Add-Ons: FireFTP / Firebug / ColorZilla / Dummy Lipsum / Firesizer
Recommendation$
Coding / Editing / FTP: CODA
CODA is a comprehensive programs that combines a robust text/HTML editor with a built-in FTP interface. CODA offers your the ability to create and manage projects. It has excellent color coding for authoring, auto tag completion that assist with writing code. Not to mention that you can use the built in reference books and upload other reference PDFs into your ‘library’.