COMP 1841 W E B P R O G RA M M I N G 1
Introduction - week 1
"A common mistake that people make when
trying to design something completely
foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity
of complete fools." - Douglas Adams
Who am I
• Matt Prichard
• No ‘t’ in Prichard X
• Not Matthew X
• Not Sir X
• Call me Matt ✓
• I tend to swear a bit - sorry in advance.
• Oh btw this is not school, you don’t have to put your hand up to go to the
toilet.
About me
• Been teaching here for about 18 years
• A student from 2003, so nearly 20 years.
• Have run a print and design company, worked as a web
designer/developer, Mac artworker and a touring musician.
• 2 kids at university age.
• Go to many gigs and festivals.
• Metal, tech metal, progressive metal, Djent, death metal, technical
death metal, math metal, groove metal, thrash metal, anarcho-punk,
hardcore, 90’s hiphop, ska and dub reggae.
How to find me
Email:
[email protected]Room: QM 366
Office Hours Term 1
Monday 12:00 – 13:00 via Teams
Tuesday 14:00 – 15:00 on campus
Module Assessment
This module is assessed by one summative coursework
(details to follow)
CW1 100%
Module aims & objectives
• A significant number of websites are powered by databases
generating dynamic content, often as content management systems
(CMS).
• This module provides students with an understanding of both client
and server-side technologies to help them design and build a CRUD
system.
• The module exposes students to the concepts of relational database
design and implementation as applied to the construction of data
driven websites. 6
Assumptions and pre-requisites
It is assumed that you have a basic grasp of core programming skills
and terminology such as:
• Variables
• Loops
• Conditional statements
• Arrays
• Functions etc…
This is a programming module, but I am not here to teach you
programming from the ground up.
Assumptions and pre-requisites 2
• This module also assumes you have a working understanding of
HTML 5 and CSS.
• If you don’t then you need to take responsibility and the time to get
up to speed using a site such as W3Schools.
• You are free to use any CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap or w3css
for example
• An understanding of JavaScript would also be useful, again
W3Schools is a good starting point.
Separation of code
• HTML is for describing the content of your page, i.e. H1,
H2, P etc.
• CSS is for laying out or formatting the content.
• JavaScript is for adding interactivity
• For ease of use and validation purposes these separations
must be strictly enforced.
Cascading Style Sheets
• Get used to using external style sheets early on. It
will save a lot of time when tracing errors.
• Check in various browsers as you build.
• Use Google Chrome or Firefox – avoid IE or Edge
Where to work and save
• For simplicities sake all work for this course should be
carried out and saved on your university I-drive. The I
drive has Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services)
server installed.
• Your university I-drive already has PHP and MySQL
installed. These are the main technologies you will be
using.
• If you choose to work from home, you can use the
Where to work and save 2
• If you do want install on your own machine I suggest:
XAMPP
• Moving between different working environments will
involve the exporting and importing of your database each
time and the updating of the connection string.
• I will explain this as we go.
Increasing your chances of
success
• For your own sake (and mine) make use of code
commenting.
• Makes small changes and save regularly.
• The more complex your
code becomes the less
chance there is of anyone
deciphering it quickly
How much work do I need to do ?
• You are (mostly) full time students
• A full-time job is 40 hours a week, let’s call it 32 hours per week at
Uni.
• You have 4 modules a term, 32 hours / 4 = 8
• That is 8 hours a week for each module.
• We give you a 2 hour lecture + 1 hour lab, that leaves 5 HOURS A
WEEK for independent study for EACH MODULE.
• Use those 5 hours to get up to speed with HTML, CSS, JS, PHP or
anything else I ask you to do.
• When I mark the coursework, I can tell who has and who hasn’t done
Code Editors
• We will use VSCode as our main code editor, but you can
use any code editor you like. VSCode is installed on the lab
machines and can installed at home for free.
• I would suggest avoiding tools such as Dreamweaver
• There is a short video on Moodle week 1 covering VS code
The core tools and
technologies for this
module
?
