Introductions

This introductory assignment is meant to introduce you to your classmates and the course staff.

Creating a Web page

For this course, you will be creating a portfolio of all of your projects on the World Wide Web (WWW). The course staff will access your course web page through this page to track your progress throughout the course, so it is very important that you keep it up-to-date. Even if you do not already have a personal home page, you should create another page for this course in a separate directory within your public_html directory on acpub.

To create the content for your web page, you can use a standard modern word processor. These editors allow you write text or import images without worrying about the actual format used on the web. Even though it is not necessary for this assignment, if you would like to learn more about the hypertext markup language, HTML, you can look at a tutorial online here.

Your homepage must be created as follows:

• it must be named index.html and must be located in a directory named cps108 within your public_html directory on acpub
• it must contain at least the following information
  • title: CompSci 108 - Fall 2009
  • your name
  • where you are from
  • your computer science autobiography (see details below)
  • a link to the CompSci 108 homepage
• it may also contain the following information
  • your nickname
  • your hobbies
  • your year
  • other courses you are taking
  • your two or three favorite web pages

For those having trouble being creative, you can fill in the template file here.

Computer Science Autobiography

Since computers are now so pervasive in society, everyone should have a variety of experiences using or programming them (or being victims of software). Before you start this course, you should take a moment to reflect on how these experiences have affected you and shaped your decision to study computer science (and to take this course).

Your autobiography should attempt to answer the following questions:

• When did you first start using a computer?
• What kinds of computers have you used?
• How do you use computers on a daily basis?
• What event(s) made you interested in studying computer science?
• What do you think a computer scientist does on a daily basis?
• Describe your best (or worst) programming experience; what made it so good (or so bad)?
• Describe your most (or least) favorite programming project; what made it so appealing (or so unappealing)?
• How do you see yourself using computers in the future?

Posting to the Bulletin Board

The course bulletin board is a place for you to ask questions that can be answered by any of the course staff or even other students. This system is a much more efficient system for getting your question answered than emailing one specific person or even waiting for an over-burdened TA during office hours. To access the bulletin board, sign in using your Net ID and password.

To get started using the bulletin board system and get used to sharing your coding issues, please reflect on your current coding practice and post two things to the category titled Introductions:

• what kind of code smell you are most often guilty of when writing code
• what kind of bug you think you most often have to fix when writing code

and what you can do to watch out for these problems in future programs you write. Feel free to write your post as a response to someone else's post if you have similar experiences; but make sure that your post adds something to the discussion, not simply echoes their comments.