CS2a: Intro to Computers
Welcome to CS2a/Aut06

· General Information
· Description
· Syllabus
· Grading

· Notes

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Instructor: Tim Hickey



Welcome to the CS2a/Aut06 Website

News

Class Links

Homework

  • Best Homeworks so far - click here if you want to see the homeworks that the TAs thought were the best of the ones they've seen so far!
  • HW1: HTML due Friday 9/15/2006 at noon.
    Late Policy for HW1 This homework is worth 10 points, but since it is the first homework and we did not have TAs available before the hw was due, you can hand it in next week with only an 0.5 point penalty for each school day that it is late (e.g. handing in on Monday is 0.5 points off, handing in on Wednesday is 1.5 points off, etc.)
  • HW2: CSS due Friday 10/5/2006 at noon.
  • HW3: Servlets due Tuesday 10/17/2006 at noon.
    Late policy: 0.5 point penalty per school day
    please add a banner "DO NOT GRADE" if you don't want it graded yet
    TAs will look at the last modified date to determine the penalty, if any
  • HW4: More Servlets due Friday 10/27/2006 at noon.
    (this will be good practice for the midterm on Tuesday 10/31!)
  • HW5: Final Project - Database-backed websites due Friday 12/8/2006 at noon.

Quizzes and Exams

Class Notes (as HTML)

Class Notes from the CS2a wiki

All Class Notes on the CS2a wiki are listed below

Reference Materials

Class notes

Week 11 - 11/6/06 - 11/10/06

Tuesday 11/7/06
Binary and Hexadecimal Numbers
Coding information with binary data (text, graphics, sound, movies)
The Inverter and the NOR and OR gates.

Friday 11/10/06
Building transistors
The NAND and AND gates
The XOR, HALF-ADDER and 1 bit ADDER and multi-bit ADDER circuits
Using CMOS circuits to store a BIT (bi-stable circuits!)

Week 10 - 10/30/06 - 11/03/06

Tuesday 10/30/06
Architecture of the PC

Friday 11/03/06
Architecture of the PC continued and
Introduction to CMOS transistors and gates.

Week 9 - 10/23/06 - 10/27/06

Tuesday 10/23/06 - Database backed servlets
Today we started working on a course evaluation website that would store user information in a database and generate summary information from that database. Here is an overview of the files we wrote and discussed:

  • admin.servlet: servlet to create the SQL table view or run
  • init.servlet: servlet to HTML template for the website view or run
  • getinfo.html: webpage to get info for the table view or run
  • addtodb.servlet: servlet to store info from from into the table view or run
  • summary.servlet: servlet to show a summary of the info in the database table view or run

Friday 10/20/06

  • Go over requirements for hw5 - the Final Project.
  • Discuss the midterm exam which will be held in class on Halloween Tuesday 10/31, costumes optional!
  • Today we worked on using the CSS positioning features in the template page to make a nice template for the course evaluation website. We spent about 45 minutes trying to get the positioning in the CSS file to work right and most of the time it wasn't working correctly with the template definition file Some of the strategies we used to find the bugs were:
    • We asked for suggestions from the class and tried multiple variations. In general, having several people look for mistakes and try to find solutions is a really good idea. This is one reason that TAs are so important for this class
    • Use validation. We did find some errors, but even after the HTML and CSS pages validated, the template page didn't look the way we wanted it to.
    • Erase the CSS and starting building it back up a little at a time. This showed us that we had errors even with very short CSS files. In general, its always a good idea to keep the files you are working with as simple as possibile and then to make them more complex and interesting after you get the bugs out!
    • Look at the class notes on positioning to make sure we understood the ideas. We did this and found a page with a positioning demo.
    • View a page in which positioning does work and try to copy the CSS. This eventually worked and we discovered that all of our divs with absolute positioning were inside a div with absolute positioning, but we didn't set the height and width of that outer div, so its height and width were 0 by default. This made for a very confusing webpage.
    These are techniques that are generally useful when working with computer programs in any language. This process of getting a program to do what you want is called debugging and it is more of an art than a science.

Week 8 - 10/16/06 - 10/20/06

Tuesday 10/16/06

  • The dbquery method and the SQL language.
  • creating and dropping tables
  • selecting data from tables
  • inserting rows into tables
  • deleting rows from tables
  • A table administration servlet
  • Storing user info in a database table
  • Accessing user info from a database table
Readings:

Friday 10/20/06
Interactive web sites:

Week 7 - 10/9/06 - 10/13/06

Tuesday 10/9/06

  • Lists of data
  • Procedural abstraction and mapping
Readings:
Handlings lists of data

Friday 10/13/06

  • Performing arithmetic calculations in servlets
  • Abstraction and the special form define
  • Prefix notation and the substitution model of Scheme evaluation

Week 6 - 10/2/06 - 10/6/06

Tuesday 10/2/06 -- NO CLASS

Friday 10/6/06 -- HTML forms

  • HW3 assigned (due in 1 week)
  • The HTML form element
  • The input elements of type text, password, submit, reset, checkbox, radio, image
  • The textarea element
  • The select element and its option subelements
  • Servlets and servlet parameters
  • The send-mail procedure
  • Generating a response page containing servlet parameter values

Week 5 - 9/25/06 - 9/29/06

Tuesday 9/26/06 - today we

  • go over quiz 1, and hw1, hw2
  • introduce the student server space needed for hw3,
  • introduce HTML forms and dynamic web pages
  • administer Quiz 2 at 1:00
Related Readings:
Sending mail from servlets
servlet parameters

Friday 9/29/06 - more on interactive webpages

  • Servlet example: submitting information by form
  • Conditional Execution
  • Restricting by IP
  • Restricting by Time
  • Restricting by Password
  • Combinations
Related Readings:
Conditional Execution

Week 4 - 9/18/06 - 9/22/06

Tuesday 9/19/06 - today we start with a lecture about the Library services, then we discuss hw2 and quiz 2.

Friday 9/22/06 - Today we start talking about interactive webpages. Also there will be a quiz today covering all of the tags and style from hw1.
Related Readings:
HTML forms

Week 3 - 9/11/06 - 9/15/06

Tuesday 9/12/06 - Today we introduce the concepts of CSS abstraction and show how to define CSS in the head or in an external file. We also discuss classes, ids, and contextual CSS. The homework is due this Friday so we will also answer any questions that arise about the homework.
Some references:

Friday 9/15/06 - today we discuss more advanced concepts in CSS, including positioning, paging, and media. Some references:

Week 2 - 9/4/06 - 9/8/06

Tuesday 9/5/2006 - Today we discuss the syntax and semantics of HTML and we show how to create a basic webpage using HTML and some simple CSS.

Friday 9/8/2006 - Today we discuss inline CSS as well as CSS in the head and external CSS.... There will be a short practice quiz at the end of class.

Week 1 - 9/1/2006

Friday 9/1/2006 - We gave an overview of the course and talked about the Architecture of the Internet

2004 © Copyright Tim Hickey, Some Rights Reserved