Web Programming

Beginning with the Fall 2008 semester, I will be teaching a Web Programming course on the Camden campus. This page will contain general information about the course and will be updated from time to time. Check here frequently.

Recommended Books

• Deitel & Deitel, Internet and World Wide Web -- How to Program, Prentice Hall, 2007 or
• Spainhour & Eckstein, Webmaster in a nutshell, O'Reilly, 2003 (also contained in Web Programming CD Bookshelf -- a collection of six books on web programming on a cd.)

Strongly Recommended Books

O'Reilly produces a series of Pocket References which are sorts of dictionaries. They are very useful. I recommend the ones on HTML and Javascript (not Java).

Software

Aside from having access to Internet Explorer, you will need additional softwware for this course. There are many programs which you can use for web programming. I ecommend the following because they are free and will run off a thumb drive. If you have other preferences, feel free to use your preferred software:

• KompoZer -- a web site editor
• FileZilla -- an FTP program
• a text editor -- good ones like TextPad or one of the portable ones
• a graphics editor -- Photoshop is nice (it won't run off a thumb drive and it's far from free) but there are free ones like Gimp that are useful
• Firefox and Opera -- you need to test your web pages with different browsers

The Portable Applications page of the class website can help you find this software.

Course Coverage

We will cover the following material in this course. Please note that we sometimes will have to mix some topics together to make things clearer:

• Web architecture -- what goes on when you ask for a web page
• HTML -- HyperText Markup Language, the basis of the Web
• CSS -- Cascading Style Sheets, a way to give your pages a common style -- WWC's page on CSS -- yet another CSS tutorial site
• Javascript -- (not Java) a web scripting language
• PHP -- another common scripting language (if we have time)
• images -- what needs to be done to make sure that images do not overrun your pages
• Web page design -- making a page useful, efficient, and accessible