CS193i Internet Technologies

Welcome to the old CS193i home page. The new page is over here. The older material below is from last year.

Here's the basic plan for this quarter -- simple socket programming, HTML, how web browsers and servers work (HTTP), CGI programming in Perl, servlets in Java. The material assumes you have some programming background. I'll give very quick introductions to Perl and Java in lecture. That's about all you can fit in a 10 week quarter, but if I were to force in something else it would probably be server side JSP or PHP programming.

Books There is no required text for 193i. I'll give out ample lecture notes, and a great deal of what you need to know is documented online. Here are a few books I recommend if you feel you must buy a book for help in a particular area...

Core Web Programming, by Marty Hall, 1998. Covers Java, HTML, HTTP, and CGI. It's a little old, but still quite useful.
Learning Perl, by Randal Schwartz. A nice thin book on Perl. (I've written a 20 page Perl handout that should be all you need, but it moves pretty quickly.)
Just Java 2 by Peter van der Linden, (4th ed?). An excellent overall introduction to Java. There are many good Java books out there of which this is a fine example.
You could get a book on servlets, but they're so simple it's hardly worth it + I don't have a favorite.

Here's last year's materials to get a sense of the course.

Handouts directory
Old Finals although the coverage in past years has been moderately different from this year. Study this year's homeworks and examples first.
Online videos -- there's a rumor that our lectures are showing up here. Have the handouts available before watching the video.
Homework criteria files via FTP
Donate a joke at Nick's Clean Joke Archive
Our WebClass -- you need to sign up before submitting HW1
Homework materials in the leland file system via FTP.
Staffers
Office Hours
Java Links
Course Summary
Books -- there is not a strictly required book, but there are several excellent recommended ones.
FAQ
To image the .pdf documents, you will need the free Acrobat Reader. Set your browser to use Acrobat to handle documents with the MIME type application/pdf.
Neal Stephenson's great but hard to characterize article (big)
Last year's handouts directory -- a handy way to peek ahead, although each year's course is moderately different.
Nick's home page.

Staff

Nick Parlante nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu
Ashley Ring ashley@cs.stanford.edu
Jennifer Chang jenchang@cs.stanford.edu
Matt Blythe mattb@cs.stanford.edu
Mike Chen michael.chen@cs.stanford.edu
Tanya Laidman tanya.laidman@cs.stanford.edu

Office Hours

Office hours are generally in Sweet hall -- look for the "193i" sign on top of the TA's workstation.

Monday
Mike 10-12
Matt 2:15-4:15
Nick 3-5+ (Gates 190)

Tuesday
Jennifer 8-10 pm

Wednesday
Mike 10-12
Matt 3-5
Ashley 7-9pm
Nick 3-5+ (Gates 190)

Thursday
Tanya 11-3
Ashley 3-5

Friday
Jennifer 11-1 (Gates)

My favorite online Java resources...

sun docs -- the front of their site is cluttered with Sun marketing stuff, but there's is lots of actual content too.
Java FAQ -- The comp.lang.java FAQ -- maintained by Peter van der Linden -- great!
Bruce Eckel's Java Book, Thinking in Java, in a free online form
Javaworld -- lots of Java articles

Here's a handy Perl guide from MIT. The Perl home page to download the interpreter. Here's a supposedly handy Intro guide in PostScript form.

About The Course

Here's the official course blurb which is reasonably accurate since I originally wrote it and I'm teaching the course...

CS193i. Internet Technologies.
Survey of contemporary Internet technologies. The course is a programmer oriented survey of the authoring, distributing, and browsing technologies which make up the Internet. Introduces the role, use, and implementation of current Internet tools. Many of the topic areas will include a non-trivial programming project. Topics include...TCP/IP: namespace, connections, and protocols. Client/server structures. World Wide Web/HTTP/HTML techniques for text, images, links, and forms. Indexing and search technologies. Server side programming, CGI scripts. Dynamic content with Java. Security and privacy issues.

Some Specifics

The course blurb is necessarily vague as it's supposed to chart out the course niche for several years -- below are some specifics for this year's course. Each topic area will have its own programming project...

TCP/IP socket programming -- C or Perl
Basic HTML authoring -- easy
Client side HTTP programming -- C or Perl
Server side CGI programming -- Perl
Client and/or server side Java programming

Books

No book is required for the course -- we will have ample handouts and other online resources. However, there are several excellent books on CS193i related material which you may find helpful...

Core Web Programming, by Marty Hall, 1998. Covers HTML, HTTP, and CGI all with a Java emphasis. If you buy only one book, this is the one. A hundred or so copies should be showing up in the bookstore by the third week of class -- they're late because publisher ran out.

Learning Perl, by Schwartz. A nice thin book on Perl.

How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site by Lincoln Stein, 2nd Ed. 1997. Covers many topics in moderate detail: HTML, HTTP, basic CGI structure. An excellent overview of web serving.

Just Java 1.2 by Peter van der Linden, (4th ed?). An excellent overall introduction to Java. There are many good Java books out there. You can also learn quite a lot of java just looking at java.sun.com/docs/.

FAQ

I have programming background XXXX -- is that sufficient?: The prefered programming prerequisite for CS193i is CS106B which is our 2nd quarter programming course. You probably can get by with one quarter of programming (CS106A), but it's not recommended. The programming prerequisite is not there because we do all that much C programming -- it's there because we use a variety of programming techniques in C, Perl, and Java and it all gets thrown at you pretty quickly. You need a strong programming and debugging background to help you absorb and deal with the breadth of technologies we use without any basic programming hand-holding. If your programming background is not that strong, you will need to be extra committed to starting the assignments early so you can pick up what you need as we go.
I'm just a nice ordinary person, am I going to get killed by the programming in CS193i?: Possibly not. In CS193i, I'm aiming to emphasize the interesting and the practical. I think that's going to make for an excellent course. On the other hand, this is not just a fluffy Internet discussion course. There will be several non-trivial homework projects which will require programming and Internet authoring effort. To be fair, I should also point out that courses I have taught at Stanford have tended to be quite demanding. But I'm trying to keep my evil-instructor side in check.
Are we covering Java? How much Exactly?? Java Java Java Java JAVA JAVA JAVA.: Java is an awesome technology which is going to be enormously influential. I want to cover enough of the core of the language to see where it fits in the big picture and assign a non-trivial Java programming project. I think that can be done in about 4 weeks -- we'll see. I am not going to cover the entire Java corpus, but we will cover enough to write something cool. I will assume you know how to program in C, and I will present OOP programming concepts and Java in particular.
What about platform X and language Y?: Where possible, I'm going to structure things so you can use whatever computer you want. Depending on what assignments I choose, I may require you to program in: C, Perl or Java. Knowing C is a prerequisite. For the others, I'll cover what's necessary in lecture. You will need basic skills to manipulate and arrange files on Unix which is why CS1u is a prerequisite.
How much Unix do I need to know?: We're going to have one or two assignments which require write and debug a C program on Unix. In addition to a basic understanding of C, you will need to know the basics of editting, compiling, and debugging on Unix. Unix and C are not the major focus of CS193i, they are just tools we happen to need to get to the interesting stuff. For people who are interested, there are many, many books on the basics of using Unix-- from "dummies guide to..." to "expert guide to...". -- go to the Stanford bookstore, Stacey's in Palo Alto, or Kepler's in Menlo Park and pick one out which appeals to you. I will try to provide a remedial compiling-on-Unix handout for the programming specific stuff.