CSc 473 Web Site Design Fall 2008 --  Syllabus

Fall 2008 TuTh 9:00-10:40AM. Prof. McCracken.

The room assigned is NAC 5/150; we will meet sometimes, when announced in advance, in a CS lab.

Office: NAC 8/202E Office hours: TuTh 11-12 and after class.

Website: ccnyddm.com .  We will use Blackboard extensively. Learn it if you don’t know it.

Textbook: Come to class before buying anything. The bookstore has my book User-Centered Website Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach, Prentice-Hall, 2004, written with Rosalee J. Wolfe, listed as required for this course. It’s a good book, but I don’t actually require you to buy it (in any sense of “require.”)

Key Website

We are going to follow the course CSE 190 at the University of Washington, developed by Marty Stepp. Thanks, Marty! Compared with previous semesters, we will be learning more about implementation, and less about usability, color, and typography. Bookmark: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse190m/08sp/index.shtml

Click on Lectures to see what I hope we can cover. Click on Homework to see your homework assignments—or at least the first two. Note that UW is on the quarter system—ten weeks. I doubt if we can go as fast as they do, but there should still be time for a final project.

NOTE: “Webster” is a system available only to students registered in CSE 190 at the University of Washington. DO NOT try to submit homework to it, and we’ll have to modify any homework assignments that access Webster for data

Homework is submitted via Blackboard, which is also used for announcements, assignments, general information, and the course gradebook.

Homework is due at 11PM on the stated due date. Lateness: one point (of 10) per day, max of three days—after that, no credit. You get five free late days.

Course Content and Learning Objectives:

This course is an introduction to programming for the World Wide Web. You will learn about topics such as:

• HyperText Markup Language (HTML) for authoring web pages
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for supplying stylistic information to web pages
• JavaScript for creating interactive web pages
• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) for enhanced web interaction and applications
• PHP Hypertext Processor for generating dynamic pages on a web server
• Structured Query Language (SQL) for interacting with databases
• The Document Object Model
• Scattered throughout: usability issues, color, fonts.

Grading

This is tentative and subject to change.

·         Homeworks: 30%

·         Quizzes (about 5): 25%

·         Midterm: 25%

·         Final project, which will have several separately-graded deliverables: 20%..

In computing your course grade I discard your lowest homework and your lowest quiz.

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