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COMP 416 (the course formerly know as COMP 117), WWW Programming
Fall 2006
The World Wide Web was originally designed to provide easy access to documents through
the Internet for a small community of high energy physicists in Switzerland. It quickly
became a much more diverse and enormously larger service for virtually all sectors of
society. It is now undergoing still further change. It is becoming the platform of choice for
network-oriented computing, and, since more and more computing is including network
components, it is likely to become the predominant platform for virtually all computing.
The purpose of this course is to learn programming concepts used in the context of the
WWW and practice applying these.
Instructor: Stephen Weiss
159 Sitterson Hall
919-962-1888
weiss@cs.unc.edu
Teaching assistants: TBA
Class meeting: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00-12:15, Sitterson 014
Text: Robert W. Sebesta, Programming the World Wide Web, 3rd edition (2006), Addison
Wesley.
Web site: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~weiss/COMP416
Other material: You will need a computer (or access to one), Internet Explorer, and a
program to gain access our UNIX system. All of the course material will be on the web;
much of it exclusively on the web.
Prerequisite: The course assumes mastery of programming at the level of COMP 114. If
you have not taken 114 or equivalent or do not know Java, see the instructor
immediately! You should also know how to use the web and how to do a web search.
Exams: There will likely be two in-class exams and a final.
Homework: Homework will be primarily reading, and writing web-based programs.
Grading: Not yet finalized, although a substantial portion of your grade will be based on
the homework.
Warnings: Like many computer science courses, this course is very time-consuming.
You can expect to spend 10-12 hours per week outside class. This is not a course in how
to design the latest and greatest web pages with flaming icons and lots of nifty graphics
and sound. It is a course in the fundamentals of the web, how to write both browser-
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based and server-based programs, including some advanced programming techniques
such as event-based programming and threads.
Finally, I take the Honor Code very seriously. Don’t cheat!