One of the areas that college courses often don’t get into is the practical system administration side of web development where you actually purchase and use real domains in real hosting environments. We’ve heard feedback from many professors that while they can’t actually teach some of the ideas in later Chapters they do assign them to students, and suggest they use the chapters as reference.
With that in mind, we’ve been busy refocusing some of the coverage on system administration to make it more practical using ideas and technologies form the DevOps world. We’ve also included some more guidance on analyzing and improving your website, which we’re actually in the process of doing to the site as I write this! (hope you only notice it getting faster and better).
Category Archives: News
One of the biggest changes in the second edition of the textbook will be the significantly expanded coverage of JavaScript. The first edition (which we wrote in 2013) had one chapter on JavaScript and another chapter on jQuery. In the new edition, there will at least three chapters (and most likely four) on JavaScript. We have recently completed the first draft of two of these new chapters. You can find an outline of the chapter topics below.
Chapter 8 – JavaScript Language Fundamentals
- What is JavaScript and what can it do
- Where does JavaScript go?
- Variables and Data Types
- JavaScript Output
- Conditions
- Loops
- Arrays
- Objects
- Functions
- Object Prototypes
This is a lot of content for one chapter. Indeed, in comparison to drafts of other chapters in the (first edition) book, this is the longest of them all. It is currently over 70 pages!
Chapter 9 – Using Javascript
- The Document Object Model
- Modifying the DOM
- Events
- Event Types
- Forms
Below, you find a few preview images from Chapter 8.
Today we received an updated list of confirmed universities with courses using our book as a required text. As before, the list does not cover non-American universities, nor is it an exhaustive list. We were thrilled to discover continued strong growth. Last year at this time, the number of universities was 48, and this year the book has been adopted now at 90 universities in just the United States. An international version of the book is available outside the USA, but the publisher doesn’t know which universities outside the USA have adopted it.
Now that the fall semester is almost here, we did want to announce that we have spent some time this past summer constructing an exam bank for the textbook. The bank will consist of a (very) long Microsoft Word document. Each chapter contains a number of multiple choice and short answer questions. This will be a living document that will grow over time and will be available to instructors via the Pearson Ed web portal for instructors who are using the book in the course.
Right now the Word document is over 80 pages, with 30-50 multiple choice questions for each chapter. We hope to make a preliminary version (that covers the first dozen or so chapters) of the exam bank available on the Pearson site within a few weeks.
We’re always interested to see which colleges and universities have adopted our book so far. Our publisher provides us with an updated list as of March 24, 2015. Unfortunately it does not cover non-American universities, nor is it even an exhaustive list. Nonetheless, it is exciting to see some new universities added to our list and to see that the book has been adopted at, at least, 48 universities in just the United States.
| # | School Name | State |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BEMIDJI STATE UNIVERSITY | MN |
| 2 | BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIV | OH |
| 3 | CAL STATE U – LOS ANGELES | CA |
| 4 | CANISIUS COLLEGE | NY |
| 5 | CARROLL UNIVERSITY | WI |
| 6 | CASCADIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE | WA |
| 7 | CMTY COLL OF R I-LINCOLN | RI |
| 8 | CMTY COLL OF R I-WARWICK | RI |
| 9 | CMTY COLL OF RHODE ISLAND | RI |
| 10 | COASTAL CAROLINA UNIVERSITY | SC |
| 11 | COLLEGE OF SAN MATEO | CA |
| 12 | COLUMBUS STATE UNIVERSITY | GA |
| 13 | DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY | TX |
| 14 | DELTA COLLEGE | MI |
| 15 | DIXIE STATE UNIVERSITY | UT |
| 16 | DRURY UNIVERSITY-SPRINGFIELD | MO |
| 17 | EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIV | MI |
| 18 | EDINBORO UNIVERSITY OF PA | PA |
| 19 | FAULKNER UNIVERSITY | AL |
| 20 | FIU – UNIVERSITY PARK CAMPUS | FL |
| 21 | FORT HAYS STATE UNIVERSITY | KS |
| 22 | GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIV | DC |
| 23 | GEORGIA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY | GA |
| 24 | GEORGIA SOUTHWSTRN ST UNIV | GA |
| 25 | GROVE CITY COLLEGE | PA |
| 26 | HAWAII PACIFIC UNIV-LOA | HI |
| 27 | HIGHLINE CMTY COLLEGE | WA |
| 28 | ITT TECHNICAL INSTITUTE | MI |
| 29 | ITT TECHNICAL INSTITUTE | UT |
| 30 | LONGWOOD UNIVERSITY | VA |
| 31 | LORAS COLLEGE | IA |
| 32 | MCDANIEL COLLEGE | MD |
| 33 | METHODIST UNIV FAYETTEVILLE | NC |
| 34 | METROPOLITAN ST UNIV OF DENVER | CO |
| 35 | MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY | MI |
| 36 | MIDWESTERN STATE UNIVERSITY | TX |
| 37 | MN ST COMM &TECH COLL – MOORH | MN |
| 38 | NORTH DAKOTA ST UNIVERSITY | ND |
| 39 | NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIV | IL |
| 40 | PACIFIC UNION COLLEGE | CA |
| 41 | PASSAIC COUNTY CMTY COLLEGE | NJ |
| 42 | SAINT CLOUD STATE UNIV | MN |
| 43 | SO ILLINOIS U-EDWARDSVILLE | IL |
| 44 | TOWSON UNIVERSITY | MD |
| 45 | UNIV OF ALABAMA-HUNTSVILLE | AL |
| 46 | UNIV OF TEXAS – AUSTIN | TX |
| 47 | UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS | KS |
| 48 | VIRGINIA TECH | VA |
We are in the midst of uploading new assignments to the Pearson teaching support site for the book. Hopefully, these will be available to everyone within the next few weeks.
Below are some screen captures of sample pages from one of the new assignments. The new assignments contain all the files needed by the students, and several also contain working solutions as well.
According to the Pearson UK site, the global edition will be available at the end of the November. It also has a fancy new cover (shown in make-believe fashion on the bus stop billboard) which aptly communicates the goal of the book: to put the necessary knowledge necessary to make modern-day web pages into the students’ hands.
As wonderful as WordPress is, it’s nice to be reminded that it requires some attention.
Just today I came to the site, hoping to post a quick entry about our textbook adoptions thus far. Instead our lovely website was replaced with the horrible “error establishing a database connection” error.
Were we hacked? Did my co-author install a plugin and go for a bike ride? No. of course not. We had table corruption – the wp_options table to be precise. The fix was as simple as a phpMyAdmin call to Repair the wp_options table.
A few minutes later, I’ve installed the latest updates, turned off those darn comments (we had over 6000) and now back to grading those assignments.
Well the 2014 Fall semester is nearly upon us and we are tidying up all materials for the book and our web development courses here at Mount Royal University.
This will be the first time where students actually have access to all these materials through the textbook and we’re pumped about the prospects.
To anyone out there using this book this semester, we hope you get as much out of the book as we put in!
Draft chapters of the Security and Content Management Systems are finally done.
Security was an especially interesting one to research and write, although I suspect I’ve landed myself on some NSA watch lists, given the terms I had to search for over the last few weeks.
It’s a fairly comprehensive look at matters related to web development security including an overview of how to protect against the most common attacks including SQL injection, Cross Site Scripting and more!
On to the hosting and administration chapter. (The end is in sight).
