teaching machines

CS 347: Lecture 1 – wwwroot

August 24, 2020 by Chris Johnson. Filed under fall-2020, lectures, webdev.

Dear students:

Welcome to CS 347: Web Development. This is going to be a weird semester. I’m new to the university. We will be conducting the class remotely. There’s a lot of tension in the world. The good news is that—well, I don’t know what the good news is. But welcome nonetheless.

I don’t think live video chat scales well, and therefore I will not be holding live synchronous lectures. Instead, I will pre-record around 30 minutes of videos dealing with the ideas and technologies of this course. We will still meet synchronously over Zoom during your scheduled section, but we will treat those times as interactive lab times in which you work on exercises. Please read more about the structure of the course in the syllabus.

For each lecture, I will post the videos, readings, and other activities that you should complete before your scheduled lab time.

Here’s your very first TODO list:

• Read the syllabus.
• Watch Internet History, in which we talk about how the internet became a thing. Feel free to watch videos at an accelerated speed. I do all the time. Change the speed through YouTube’s controls. Chrome users, I recommend installing the Video Speed Controller extension.
• Watch Web History, in which we talk about how the web became a thing on the internet.
• Watch Web Terminology, in which we discuss a few terms that get thrown around when we talk about the web.
• Watch Mechanics of HTTP, in which we write code to issue an HTTP request.
• Watch First HTML, in which we look at the general structure of HTML files.
• Watch Element Gallery, in which we briefly examine a handful of common HTML elements.
• Watch Haiku, in which we take a poetic aside.
• Read chapters 2 and 3 of Client-side Web Development. I know of no satisfactory way of accelerating reading.
• Post any questions and comments you have regarding the videos and readings on the course Slack.
• Install Visual Studio Code. You are encouraged to use this editor this semester. It is free, and it is emerging as popular tool in the webdev community. It also has integrated Git support and a builtin terminal—both of which we will need. You are free to use other tools as long as you don’t expect any support from me.

See you next time.

Sincerely,