GVSU CIS 371

Week 1 - Day 1

Introduction

• Office Hours
  • If the door is open, feel free to come in and ask questions
• I like mouthy students
  • Feel free to have fun (within reason)
  • Don’t hesitate to declare a (non-course) subject “off limits”. No need to explain.
• No textbook
• If you can’t program “fluently”, the course will be very difficult
• Piazza vs. Discord
• GitHub accounts
• Semester Project
  • Start thinking about project now.
  • Needs to be more innovative than a few “CRUD” pages.
  • You can improve an existing app, provided you make a substantial, innovative, non-trivial improvement.
  • Applying an app to a new domain “Yelp for U-Pick blueberries” is acceptable provided the change is non-trivial (i.e., more than just a “re-skin” / relabeling of fields.)
• “Big Picture” of this course
  • Not just to teach web technologies, but also “big picture” underlying the technologies.
  • You can learn the web technologies from web pages and video tutorials, but
  • Tutorials will just teach you “magic words”
  • The problem is that when the magic words don’t work, your only recourse is go to back to the Internet for different magic words
  • My goal is to teach you the general principles underlying the technology so that when the obvious thing doesn’t work as expected, you have the context needed to investigate/debug the problem.
    • Debugging by trial-and-error is horribly inefficient
    • Relying on solutions you don’t understand is dangerous (from a business perspective)
    • Relate Spectrum experience (Is it the server, the network, the firewall, the password rotation, etc.)
  • Switch to Browsers and Servers notes

Week 1 Day 2: Origins of the Web

• Switch to Web history notes

Week 1 – Day and 3

• Switch to Browsers and Servers notes