Supplementary Course Notes

This page contains annotated links to other pages on this site, which in turn contain notes on various topics designed to supplement or enhance material from the course text and/or the in-class presentations.

  1. Some Additional Info about the Internet and the WWW Some odds and ends not in the text.
  2. Some Information about XHTML A brief summary of some useful information on XHTML.
  3. Some Information about CSS A brief summary of some useful information on CSS.
  4. Vendor Prefixes for CSS3 Some of the different vendor-specific prefixes used to handle various CSS3 features not yet implemented as part of the standard in various browsers.
  5. CSS Properties and Values (pdf) A fairly comprehensive list of CSS 2.1 properties and the values that each one may assume.
  6. Some Information about Core JavaScript A brief summary of some useful information on JavaScript (the core language).
  7. Some Information about the DOM and Client-Side JavaScript A brief summary of some useful information on the Document Object Model ("the DOM") and client-side JavaScript for accessing the DOM.
  8. Some Information about PHP A brief summary of some useful information on PHP.
  9. Some Information about Relational Databases Relational databases are currently the most widely used of several different types of database schemes. Before setting up a database it is a good idea to have at least some idea of a few of the underlying principles.
  10. Some Information about MySQL MySQL is a database program that seems to have a particularly close association with PHP, but other languages, including Perl and Java, can be used as a front end to this database as well.
  11. Some Information about Cookies and Sessions A brief summary of some of the basic ideas behind cookies and sessions.
  12. Some Web Acronyms Some acronyms that you will encounter in the process of web development.
  13. Some Information about Web Browsers Some general information about web browsers.
  14. Regular Expressions Regular expressions provide a basis for very powerful pattern matching capabilities found in many different programming languages. Though there are some differences in the approach to regular expressions themselves, as well as in their usage from one language to another, the basic ideas and many of the constructs and techniques are both approach-consistent and language-independent. This page gives a summary of some of the generic basics.
  15. Comparing JavaScript, PHP and Perl ... This page provides some links to other pages containing comparisons of various "core" language features of the three scripting languages JavaScript, PHP and Perl. So many of the core features of these three languages are the same or similar that it can be a daunting task keeping the details straight in one's mind. These (mostly short) pages constitute a work in progress, and are meant to be quick-and-dirty references, i.e., places where you might (or might not) be able to quickly look up some helpful information on a particular feature if you can't quite remember how it goes in the scripting language you're currently using. Note that Python is another scripting language that should be in this group, and may eventually be added.