COMP249 : Web Technology
Resources and Support Materials
This page contains links to various resources of general interest.
Software
PortableApps.com has a version of FireFox that you can put on your memory stick to carry around your personal bookmarks and extensions. Firefox has a powerful extension architecture which allows you to add functionality via extensions. Some of these are very useful for web development, for example:
- Web Developer adds a new toolbar with many useful options, eg. turn off CSS, outline block level elements etc.
- Live HTTP Headers allows you to see the conversation between your browser and the server. Good for learning about HTTP and also for debugging your server side scripts.
- You might also want to look at this list of the top 10 firefox extensions to improve your productivity on Lifehack.org.
If you install these in your portable Firefox installation they will be available wherever you can get access to a windows computer. I've bundled up Firefox with the two extensions installed with two other useful applications (Putty and WinSCP) in a zip file. You can unpack this on your flash drive for instant access to these applications: comp249apps.zip.
Editors
The editor that I've been using in the screencast videos is jEdit which is free, Java based and runs on any platform (I run it on Windows, OS X and Linux). It has lots of support for HTML, CSS, Python and pretty much any other language that you might find yourself writing. This message suggests that it might run from a USB stick too, though I've not tried that.
More recently, I've been using Komodo Edit which is a free version of a commercial editor. Again it provides a range of tools to support writing HTML, Javascript, Python and many other languages. It looks like it might be available as a portable application for use from a USB stick (though I can't download it at the moment).
Origins of the Web
Tim Berners-Lee has an interesting FAQ which answers some questions about how the Web began and how it works now.
Learning HTML
Some good resources are W3 Schools and Philip Greenspun's How to learn HTML in 21 minutes which also contains some good points about web design.
Want to use the FONT tag in your HTML? Think again. Anyone who uses FONT should read this article and stop immediately.
Web Design
I refer to Jakob Nielsen's site in lectures as a good place to look for web useability and web site design pointers. He also has two good books on web design, one of which (Homepage usability : 50 websites deconstructed) is in the university library.
Another seminal book on web design is Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think! : a common sense approach to web usability which can also be found in the library.
Web Browsers
Browser News and the counter.com often show browser statistics.
CSS
The W3C CSS page links to the various standards as well as info about tutorials, authoring tools and books on CSS. I find the CSS1 standard quite a good reference for the various CSS properties and their values.
A very good introduction to CSS is Dave Raggett's Adding a touch of Style, which is part of a larger HTML tutorial.
Tutorials on advanced CSS techniques: Max Design has a number of articles including how to achieve liquid 3 column layouts with CSS.
Python
You can download the latest version (2.6.4) of Python from www.python.org.
Dive Into Python is a free online book which introduces Python for those who already know how to program. It contains many examples and links to other resources for the topics it covers.
The Python Documentation can be found online and includes an introductory tutorial chapter as well as reference material for the add-on modules.