diff --git a/tutorial/1-serialization.html b/tutorial/1-serialization.html
index 2d7d724f6..7fb9e36fd 100644
--- a/tutorial/1-serialization.html
+++ b/tutorial/1-serialization.html
@@ -127,6 +127,7 @@ margin-top: 5px;
               <ul class="nav nav-list side-nav">
 <li class="main"><a href="#tutorial-1-serialization">Tutorial 1: Serialization</a></li>
 <li><a href="#introduction">Introduction</a></li>
+<li><a href="#setting-up-a-new-environment">Setting up a new environment</a></li>
 <li><a href="#getting-started">Getting started</a></li>
 <li><a href="#creating-a-model-to-work-with">Creating a model to work with</a></li>
 <li><a href="#creating-a-serializer-class">Creating a Serializer class</a></li>
@@ -143,8 +144,20 @@ margin-top: 5px;
 <h1 id="tutorial-1-serialization">Tutorial 1: Serialization</h1>
 <h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
 <p>This tutorial will walk you through the building blocks that make up REST framework.   It'll take a little while to get through, but it'll give you a comprehensive understanding of how everything fits together.</p>
+<h2 id="setting-up-a-new-environment">Setting up a new environment</h2>
+<p>Before we do anything else we'll create a new virtual environment, using <a href="http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/index.html">virtualenv</a>.  This will make sure our package configuration is keep nicely isolated from any other projects we're working on.</p>
+<pre><code>mkdir ~/env
+virtualenv --no-site-packages ~/env/djangorestframework
+source ~/env/djangorestframework/bin/activate
+</code></pre>
+<p>Now that we're inside a virtualenv environment, we can install our package requirements.</p>
+<pre><code>pip install django
+pip install djangorestframework
+</code></pre>
+<p><strong>*Note:</strong> To exit the virtualenv environment at any time, just type <code>deactivate</code>.  For more information see the <a href="http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/index.html">virtualenv documentation</a>.*</p>
 <h2 id="getting-started">Getting started</h2>
-<p>To get started, let's create a new project to work with.</p>
+<p>Okay, we're ready to get coding.
+To get started, let's create a new project to work with.</p>
 <pre><code>django-admin.py startproject tutorial
 cd tutorial
 </code></pre>