Course Content
The course is essentially broken into two pieces. Around 3/4 of the course is dedicated to learning the basics of database design and use. You will complete 3 medium homework assignments and discuss them with your peers. The second part of the class will involve creating a simple website with a robust database backend.
There are two kinds of prepared material, they are both equally valuable. One kind are lectures which more formally go over the material. The second are “Real Coding” videos that demonstrate actual implementation and use of MySQL and web programming.
There will also be small quizzes which will help you keep informed of your understanding of the material. With few exceptions if you ever get a wrong answer on a quiz that means you are not understanding critical information and it is your responsibility to get clarification from your peers.
Student Expectations
Prior Knowledge
Students are expected to know the following:
You should be familiar with good coding practices. Good coding style is required and not taught in this class. You should understand basic control structures. If you are unable to code a simple sorting algorithm, you will have trouble in this class as this level of coding experience is expected.
You should also have completed 290 or be a strong student currently taking the course. It is possible to take these two courses at the same time, but if you run into difficulty in 290 you can have some real trouble late in this course, so do that with some caution.
Code quality
Code must be clear and you must understand what it is doing. Having well commented and documented code is going to be extremely important. I or the TA may not know the platform you are using so it is your responsiblity to make sure that we can follow what is happening.
You should also have no major errors in your program. If we can manage to get the program to throw some default error message that is usually a major issue. Errors which you handle by popping up a message the user would understand (eg. 'Please enter only numbers in the age field') are usually fine, error messages like 'Error 0x00001: Null pointer to Null found, expected pointer to Int Factory Factory' are not.
When possible, you should find a style guide and conform to it.