Syllabus

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF CONTINUING AND PROFESSIONAL STUDIES
Web Development Intensive
Fall, 2011

Instructor

Amos Bloomberg
a b 1 2 5 8 a t n y u d o t e d u

Course Hours

Weekdays; September 24 – December 17; 9am – 6pm
No class 11/26

7 E 12th St, Room 327.

What we call the web, or World Wide Web, has been around for less than 20 years. However, in that time, content on the web has exploded, spawning a wide variety of technologies and practices in its stead. There is a wealth of lousy documentation and bad advice available online. There is also a huge amount of useful information, if you know what to look for and where to look for it.

This class takes a practical best-practices approach, and addresses the core technologies and techniques used to make the vast majority of websites and web applications. At the end of the class, you will have an in-depth understanding of how most websites are made and you will know how to ask the right questions to self-direct your future learning in this field.

Workload

This is a programming course.  We learn how to program web sites using a variety of programming languages, not how to make web sites look pretty.  If you are more interested in design, you’d be better off in a web design course.

This is very much a workshop course in which students will work on assignments and projects for about half of each class as well as between classes. We will be covering a lot of material in a short amount of time, including XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL in detail. We may also delve into XML, RSS, AJAX, APIs, Facebook Applications, etc. Most semester-long courses cover one or two of these technologies only, so this class is necessarily fast-paced and intensive.

Every class builds off of the material from the last class and homework assignments. So please ask questions when you dont understand something, and follow the examples diligently, or you will find yourself falling behind quickly.

This is a very difficult course. There are slower-paced courses that cover this same material – if you are overwhelmed after the first or second day of class, it’s probably a good idea to switch courses. Things only get more complicated as we proceed.

Texts

We will rely on online resources for all of the class readings. Our primary online textbooks will be:

For those students who wish to have a book as a reference, past students have found the books by Peachpit press to be well written. Here are some that have been recommended by others:

Course Sites and Requirements

The servers: We will be using standard commercial server for this course. The URI of our web server is http://onepotcooking.com. The official class blog, available here at http://wd.onepotcooking.com will be where assignments and readings will be posted, discussions will be held, etc. Content here will be updated frequently.

Student blogs: Students will maintain their own class blogs using WordPress’s hosted blog service. The use of a blog aggregator, such as Google Reader, will allow all students to monitor all discussions on each other’s blogs through a single interface.

Grading and Other Policies

Grades: Course grades are based evenly on four requirements:

  • Attendance: 25%
  • Quizzes: 25%
  • Assignments: 25%
  • Final Projects: 25%

Woody Allen famously said, Eighty percent of success is showing up. In this course, its actually 25%.

Final Project Due Date: linked from your blog and complete no later than the last day of class.

Backup Files: Files on the server or on the laptops in the classroom may become corrupt or be overwritten at any time. In fact, it is safe to assume that they will be. Therefore, all students are responsible for saving a hard copy or a backup in some digital form of all work done in class. I recommend you bring a flash drive to class and save all files there.

Blogs: All assignments and course documents will be available on the instructor’s blog. You are required to post links to your assignments on your own blogs.

Homework: All completed assignments must published online, and must be linked to from each student’s personal blog. If the links posted to your blog don’t work, the homework is not complete.

Syllabus: The syllabus is tentative and subject to change at the discretion of the instructor.