Every coder has a set of programs that they prefer over all others. If you're just getting into Discord bot development, you might be trying to decide what programs you want to use to write your bot. This isn't a list of "the best", but it's the programs that I've found I like better than others.
Obviously a necessity if you're making a bot for Discord. There are a number of great communities on Discord to help you out if you're having trouble, as well.
Node has a very easy learning curve, and with NPM there is a package available for whatever you want to do. If you haven't decided what language you want to write your bot in, this is what I'd recommend.
Any IDE will do, but if you haven't decided on your preferred IDE, VS Code is an excellent choice. It has a number of useful features out of the box, has a large library of extensions for anything that's missing, and is open source.
If you want your bot to be open source, GitHub is something of an industry standard. If you plan to host your bot on Heroku, the two integrate easily, making it simple to push updates to your bot.
For small, simple bots, Heroku is a free option for hosting. If you add a credit card, you get enough free credit to host your bot 24/7, and Heroku integrates with GitHub, making pushing updates simpler. As long as you don't need to write to any files, Heroku is an excellent choice.
If you need to be able to write to files, or Heroku doesn't work for some other reason, a VPS may be necessary. OVH is the host I use, but any VPS should be good enough.
If you choose to go with a VPS, you'll need some kind of SSH client to access it. PuTTY is a lightweight, free, and easy to use option.
Probably the least-used program on the list, but WinSCP is useful for making quick edits to files or looking at directory structure without having to mess with the command line.
As a bonus, I've found An Idiot's Guide (https://anidiots.guide) to be the best tutorial for learning how to code a Discord bot. If you're going the Node.js route, make sure you're familiar with the Discord.js documentation (https://discord.js.org).
