CS 142 Course Information

Lectures

Lectures are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 11:00-11:50 in Building 370, Room 370. Lecture notes are available in advance and provide an outline for much of the material that will be presented in class; we recommend that you print out the notes and bring them to class so you can mark them up with additional notes during lecture.

Books

The following textbooks are recommended for the class:

The Ruby Programming Language, by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto, (O'Reilly Media).
Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition, by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Hansson (Pragmatic Bookshelf).
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition, by David Flanagan (O'Reilly Media).

These books are well-written and comprehensive. However, in the past many students have found it possible to get most or all of the information they need from the Web. For example, the O'Reilly books are available free to Stanford students through Safari Books Online. Of the three books above, the Rails book is the one most used by students in the past.

In addition to these books you will also need access to reference documentation on HTML, CSS, and the DOM. One good online source for this information is http://w3schools.com/. This site should have enough material for CS 142 but it is not quite comprehensive. If you want to know everything about HTML standards, the best source is Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, Third Edition, by Danny Goodman (O'Reilly Media).

Section

The class will have a weekly discussion section led by the course assistants. The section will supplement lecture with additional examples, and it will also cover additional material for the projects. The section will meet on Monday afternoons from 2:15-3:05 in Building 200, Room 205 starting the second week of classes.

Projects

The class will include 8 projects, one due each week except the first week and the week of midterms.
Projects will be due at the same time each week, on Thursdays at 11:59 PM.
You will work individually on the projects. You may discuss projects with other students, but you must work alone when writing code.
About 20% of your grade for each project will be based on style (cleanliness of code, appearance of Web pages, proper use of XHTML, etc.). The remaining 80% of the grade will be based on functionality (have you implemented all of the requirements for the project, and does your code actually work).
Extensions: each student is allowed a total of 72 extension hours, which may be spent in units of 24 hours on any project(s) throughout the quarter. Once your extension hours have been used up, late work will not receive any credit.

Exams

The class will have a midterm exam during the sixth week (Oct. 25-29) and a final examination during exams week. You may bring two double-sided 8.5x11" pages of notes with you to exams; other than that, exams are closed-book.

Grading Policy

Grades for the class will be determined based on a 100-point total score computed as follows:

Projects	50	points
Midterm	15	points
Final	35	points
Total	100	points

Students with Documented Disabilities

Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC) located within the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). SDRC staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, and prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the SDRC as soon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066).

CS 142: Web Applications (Fall 2010)