CSCI A348
Mastering the World-Wide Web

Spring `96 Course Overview

Meeting times
Class meets Monday and Wednesday, 4:00-5:15pm in LH102. One discussion section/lab meets Thursday, 4:40-5:30pm in LH115/LH004, the other meets Friday, 10:10-11:00am in LH115/LH004. (The Friday 9:05am discussion section has been cancelled due to lack of enrollment.) Students should attend one of these discussion sessions each week. They will be for more specific help, advice and discussion about assignments, readings, projects, topics, etc than can be covered in the regular classes. They may involve laboratory sessions, meeting in the course's computer lab, as needed.
Instructor
Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>, office LH430E, phone 855-6999.
Associate Instructors
Steve DeCherrie <dech@cs.indiana.edu>, office LH301I, phone 855-8898
Stephen Hughes <sthughes@cs.indiana.edu>, office LH201H, phone 855-8898
Office hours
Kinzler: Monday and Friday 9:00-10:00am, and by appointment.
DeCherrie: Friday 11:00-1:00pm, and by appointment.
Hughes: Tuesday 11:00-12:00pm, and by appointment.
Computer facilities/Lab
Students will have use of the Burrow, a new cluster of Sun SPARCstation 4 workstations running the Solaris operating system with the Common Desktop Environment in room LH004. Users of this cluster will be allowed to run Internet servers out of their accounts, within policy guidelines. Students will be provided with accounts and card access to the room. Specific usage policy and restrictions will be available then as well. Students may also make use of other campus computing facilities, made available to all students, for some aspects of the course.
Prerequisites
Students should have at least two semesters programming experience, or its equivalent, and be comfortable working with an operating system such as Unix or DOS. They should also have familiarity with the Internet and the World-Wide Web, such as could be gained in CSCI A148 Working the World-Wide Web.

Student responsibilities

Classes
Students are expected to attend and participate in classes and discussion sections, though attendance will not be monitored.
Readings
Readings will be regularly assigned from the two course texts: Build a Web Site by net.Genesis and Devra Hall from Prima Publishing and Learning Perl by Randal L Schwartz from O'Reilly & Associates. These will frequently be supplemented by material and resources on the Web itself and perhaps occasionally with readings on reserve at the Swain library. Students will be responsible for all material in assigned readings, whether or not that material is discussed in class. If you have any questions about material not covered in class, please ask.
Assignments
There will be homework assignments throughout the course. Some will involve the incremental stages of building a personal Web site. Others may involve programming (custom or specified) or topic research and presentation on the Web.
Group project
Students will participate in one large group project for much of the course. Groups may consist of between one to four students and students may select their own groups. They may also select the goal of the project, with the approval of the instructor. It should involve the creation and development of a unique Web resource of some form.
Exams
There will be two exams, a midterm on 26 February in class, and a final on Monday, 29 April from 2:45-4:45pm. No make-ups will be given except under extreme circumstances and by permission of the instructor before the exam.
Academic integrity
The Computer Science department has prepared a statement on academic integrity describing the obligations of students, a copy of which is accessible from the CS home page. All students should read this and ask us if they have any questions.

Grading

The midterm exam will count 15%, the final exam 20%, the group project 30%, and the assignments 35%. The lowest assignment will be be weighted half as heavily as the others when computing the final average. Incompletes will be handled in accordance with Computer Science department policy. In particular, incompletes will only be given to students who have successfully completed most of the coursework, and who have an acceptable reason for the incomplete. Unexpected difficulty with other classes is not an acceptable reason for an incomplete.

Course communication

E-mail
It will be expected that all students check their campus e-mail frequently and that it is a reliable way to correspond with students about course matters. Make sure that e-mail addressed to you @indiana.edu is received. You may, of course, use e-mail to communicate with your instructors and other students.
Newsgroup
ac.csci.a348. You should read this daily for announcements, assignments, changes, etc. Also, please use this newsgroup for open questions, news, discussion participation, etc. Your questions will be answered most quickly via the newsgroup since whoever sees them first -- the instructors or the other students -- can reply.
Web pages
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/a348/index.html. This will be an official source of course information and will be kept up to date. Noteworthy changes here will be announced in the newsgroup. This index page will also include a dated log of changes which you can use to keep current. Readings and assignments will be posted here.

About learning the World-Wide Web

The forefront of World-Wide Web technology is advancing at a phenomenal rate. Texts and prepared course matter become out-of-date shortly after they are completed. Fortunately, the Web documents itself fairly well. Therefore, a primary goal of your instructors is to teach you how to keep abreast and informed of Web advancements and to research issues to the depth you need. With this, you can keep up long after this course is over.

The scope of Web advancements and innovations is expanding so fast that one person is hard-pressed to keep up with all of them in more than a superficial sense, including your instructors. Fortunately, we have a diverse population of students in the course, some with considerable expertise in some course topics or related issues. So, this course may be unusual in the degree which the students themselves participate in the teaching process -- whether via group work, class discussions or solicited presentations.

Other

Students who need any special accommodation must contact the the instructor during the first week of class to discuss arrangements. If you have any questions that this doesn't cover, please let us know!

<kinzler@cs.indiana.edu> 8 January 1996