Skills you will need for INFM 718N

First, you will need a computer!  It does not matter if this computer
is a laptop or a desktop, or whether it is a Windows, Mac, or unix
machine.  If it is a desktop, you will need administrator privileges
(which you have if you own the computer and which you probably don't
have if you don't) and you will need high-speed networking (or your
downloads will take forever).  If it is a laptop and you have wireless
networking, then you can use the high-speed network at the University
to do your downloads.

Before starting the course, you should be able to:

- Download and install software without the use of an automatic
  installer program on whatever kind of computer you will be using,
  including the ability to uncompress zip files (I use WinZip for
  this), to copy files from one directory to another, to edit
  environment variables, to navigate the directory system using a
  command line interpreter, and to figure out what went wrong when
  something inevitably does.  You do not need to know advanced
  techniques like how to manually edit the Windows registry, however.
  The reason you need to know all of this is that the technique
  described in the book for installing the software you will need
  assumes that you know it.  This is not a learning objective for the
  course, so it does not matter whether you know how to do this
  yourself or whether you simply know someone who knows how to do it
  that is willing to help you out.  Since even machines with similar
  operating systems can be very different, it is often not practical
  to offer advice on software installation by email.  If you have a
  desktop machine, there is no real alternative to your knowing how to
  do this on your own machine.  If you have a laptop, you could bring
  it to the Professor or TA and show us what the problem is, although
  there is no guarantee that we will know how to fix it if your
  operating system is different from the one we use (I use Windows
  XP).

- Edit a file and save it where you want it with whatever name you
  want.  Notepad is good enough, but something more powerful like pico
  would be better.  Personally, I use emacs.  It is not advisable to
  use a word processor (e.g., Microsoft Word) because configuring a
  word processor for the precision and control needed in programming
  is actually harder than using a simpler editor (the first time Word
  puts in an unprintable character code or capitalizes something that
  needs to be lower case you'll understand why!).

We won't be going over those issues in much detail in class.  

You will also need to understand some basic things well enough that we
can build on them.  Will will discuss these in class, but both the
class and the book assume some prior familiarity with the ideas at the
level covered in INFM 603.  Among those are:

- How to construct simply HTML pages using a text editor and the raw
  HTML codes, and how to read raw HTML that is written by other people
  (notably, the author of our textbook!).  Simply knowing how to use a
  Web page editor like Dreamweaver would not be good enough because we
  will be using PHP to generate HTML and you need to understand what
  you are actually generating.  You need not know all the details, but
  you must know HTML well enough that you can use a reference source
  to understand what you read or to figure out how to achieve effects
  that you wish to achieve.  Note that the book uses XHTML, but it
  would be good enough to understand ordinary HTML because the
  differences between the two are fairly small and you can write PHP
  with either.

- The basic ideas behind programming.  The book presents what you need
  to know to write a program in PHP, but it does not spend much time
  on how to think about the process of creating programs.  You don't
  need to know advanced concepts like recursion or object-oriented
  programming when you start the class, but it would help to know the
  difference between a variable and an array, how loops are used with
  arrays, how to get from a simple problem description to a nested set
  of loops and conditional expressions that solve that problem, and
  how to decompose complex problems into simpler ones using function
  calls.  You need not be expert in any of that, and you don't even
  need to know those particular buzzwords as long as you understand
  the ideas.  If you can write a program in any language that looks in
  an array to see if your name is there, you know what you need to
  know.  If not, you would be well advised to pick up any basic
  introduction to programming (a book or a Web page) and use that to
  learn to write a few simple programs that involve function calls and
  nested loops and conditionals.  JavaScript comes with every Web
  browser, so if you need to pick a language to learn for this
  purpose, JavaScript would be a fine choice.  Learning PHP from
  scratch is equally easy (the same author has a tutorial book on that
  subject), but getting your hands on PHP before the class starts
  might not be as easy -- it is not as widely available as JavaScript
  is.

- How to construct a database that contains multiple tables in
  Microsoft Access, or in some other database management system.  You
  should be able to create queries using join, select and project
  operators, but you need not know SQL before starting the class --
  just understanding the ideas and being able to use a graphical query
  browser is fine.  You won't need to know how to use any database
  management system's functions for developing user interfaces because
  we'll be doing that using the Web.  You should have been previously
  exposed to some form of object modeling (e.g., UML or
  entity-relationship diagrams) and you should understand in at least
  a general way how object modeling is related to table design in a
  relational database.  But you need not be expert in producing table
  designs from object models at the outset.

The rest of what you need to know, we'll cover in class.  In
particular, you need not have run a Web server before.