Fall 2005 TuTh 9:00-10:40AM. Prof. McCracken.
The room is NAC 5/102. We will meet sometimes, when announced, in the lab in NAC 7/118.
Office: NAC 8/202E Office hours: TuTh 11-12 and after class. Sometimes around 4 on Monday and Wednesday.
Website: ccnyddm.com check for news, homeworks, etc.
Textbook: Come to class before buying anything. We need six books, approximately, but it wouldn’t be the same six for each student. I’ll have suggestions, and links to a huge amount of useful information on the Web.
In this course we will:
Students have diverse backgrounds
Based on knowing many students from 221 and from inspection of transcripts, it is obvious that some people already know some of topics listed above, with a lot depending on when they took 221 and with whom. I will try to establish students’ backgrounds with a survey on the first day. Until I see those surveys, it’s rather hard to be specific about the course content and pace. It is possible that at some time we will form “Special Interest Groups” (SIGs) for people with similar interests and/or backgrounds.
Comparison with previous semesters
This course has evolved steadily since its beginnings in 1999 as mostly a graphic design course. If you have heard about the course from students who took it in the last year or so, the differences (as best I can judge a week before classes start) will be:
· There will continue to be an emphasis on writing HTML that conforms to World Wide Web Consortium standards.
· There will be a continued, if slightly decreased, emphasis on user testing.
· There will a greatly reduced emphasis on website design from a theoretical standpoint in terms of content organization, navigation design, graphical design, etc. These make great sense if the course is seen as an introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but this term I want to put much more emphasis on actual implementation of a complete website including the server-side functions.
· There will be less emphasis on color, typography, and accessibility.
· We will have to use Java rather extensively, since we will be using JDBC to connect to a database. Students who took 221 with me in Spring 2005 have seen this; those who did not, or who have not studied Java at all, might be a candidate for a SIG.
· To send anything back to a user requires processing the user’s request and then—somehow—generating HTML to send back. We’ll learn how to do that with Servlets and JSP, but to do that we need a Web server and a Web container. Enter Tomcat, which is not total rocket science, but it is extremely picky about things like file structure and XML configuration files. I struggled through the elements of this early in the summer; a fair amount of course time may be needed to get everybody up to speed. Any students with prior knowledge of the subject will be strongly encouraged to provide support to other students (and to me) in any useful way we can find.
Getting started
We’ll begin with an individual assignment to produce a Web page with HTML and a style sheet. You will have a handout with all the needed information and we’ll go over it the first day of class. After that, a great deal will depend on the background and interests of the class members.
In a syllabus I normally provide information on grade computation, exams, etc. With so much uncertainty about important aspects of the course, I am going to postpone doing that for a week or two.
Important dates (Fall 2005):
· Thursday, October 4: No school.
· Monday, October 10: No school (Columbus Day).
· Tuesday, October 11: Follows Monday schedule. WE DO NOT MEET.
· Thursday, October 13: No school.
· Tuesday, November 24: Thanksgiving. No school.
· Thursday, December 15: Last day of class.