Web Design and Databases (F27WD)

Course overview

Welcome to the Web Design and Databases webpage. In a nutshell, this course says:

“How to design a website.”

I’m co-lecturing this course with my colleage Albert Burger.

Mock paper

A mock paper for my half of the course is available:
- Without solutions (do this first).
- With solutions.

Lecture times

- Mondays at 12:15 in LT2.
- Mondays (lab) at 13:15 in EM2.50.
- Wednesdays at 12:15 in EM3.36.

Lectures

Lecture of Monday 11 January at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 1.
Lab of Monday 11 January at 13:15: See Lab 1.
One enterprising student hacked the page source of Yahoo to change the background colour to bright yellow and the font to Comic Sans. This works for me: using Google Chrome navigate to uk.yahoo.com, then navigate to the menu (top right) → More Tools → Developer Tools. In Firefox it seems to be Menu → Developer → Toogle Tools. Ctrl-Shift-I seems to be the standard shortcut. This was his result.
Lecture of Wednesday 13 January at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lectures 1 and 2.
Lecture of Monday 18 January at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 3.
By the way, it turns out that the web is awash with bad websites; take your pick. Deliberately poor websites include TWWWE and this gem.
Lecture of Wednesday 20 January at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lectures 3 and 4.
Lecture of Monday 25 January at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 5.
Lecture of Wednesday 27 January at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 6.
Lecture of Monday 1 February at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 7.
See this CSS selector reference sheet and Wikipedia on the difference between span and div (note: span can appear in p tags, div can’t). See also this webpage exploring what happens when a class and an id have the same name in CSS (thanks to Lachlan).
Lecture of Wednesday 3 February at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 8.
I gave an impromptu talk about copyright. Copyright is important for promoting innovation, yet many vested interests arguably subvert it to do the opposite. Thanks to Craig for sending me a link to this excellent Youtube video on copyright. See also the cost of knowledge (academia) and Der Untergang parodies and an article on the subject here (popular culture), and this article on the cost of drugs (health).
Lecture of Monday 8 February at 12:15: Watch it and/or read the slides for lecture 8. I also discussed commoditisation of hardware, the operating system, and of applications. See this useful article by Joel Spolsky.

Exercises

- Exercises are here. Note that these count towards coursework.
- You must read my note on how to answer questions.

Misc course information

- Balsamique.
- The class schedule.
- Key Staff are: me and Albert Burger in Edinburgh, and Talal Shaikh in Dubai.
- You need a MACS user account, and a MySQL account. Speak with Iain McCrone in room EM1.33. He can also be contacted by email @ help@macs.hw.ac.uk.
- The course has two lectures and one lab timetabled each week. Lectures are in two parts: the first focusing on Web design; the second on databases. There is a new lab each week to help you gain a practical understanding of the material in the lectures.
- A nice source of exercises on html and css exercises on w3resource. I should work my way through these myself. See also the w3resource main page.

Recommended books

- Head First Web Design by Watrall and Siarto, published by O’Reilly. Available used off Amazon here.
- Don’t make me think by Steve Krug, second edition, published by New Riders. Available used Amazon here.
- Don’t make me think Revisited by Steve Krug, second edition, published by New Riders. Available used off Amazon here.
- Database Management Systems, by Patricia Ward, ISBN 978-1-40800-768-6. Available used off Amazon here.

List of lecture slides

∾ WDClass1.pdf ∾ WDClass2.pdf ∾ WDClass2HandOut.pdf ∾ WDClass3.pdf ∾ WDClass4.pdf ∾ WDClass5.pdf ∾ WDClass6.pdf ∾ WDClass7.pdf ∾ WDClass8.pdf ∾ WDClass9.pdf

List of labs

∾ WDLab1.pdf ∾ WDLab2.pdf ∾ WDLab3.pdf ∾ HTML_Examples.zip ∾ CodePart2.zip ∾ WDLab4.pdf ∾ lounge.zip ∾ IEEE-article.pdf

The Rules

1. Turn up!
2. Understand lecture materials as you get them.
3. A student who thinks “I don’t understand this now; I’ll sort it out during the holidays” is in denial (look at 1m03s).
4. Rules 1-3 above apply especially to those who believe rules 1-3 above don’t apply to them.

A bit about me

I am a researcher in theoretical computer science. My research is mostly in formal logic.
Everybody calls me Jamie but my name is actually Murdoch. You can contact me by e-mail on “gabbay at macs hw ac don’ttypethis uk”. My office is G.50 Earl Mountbatten Building.

The students …

… should be mostly first year undergraduate students.

If you don’t know what an undergraduate student looks like, think of minions, but less yellow.