Course Software

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 Useful Links
Required Software

Browsers

The following broswers are reccomended for this course. My personal recommendation is to use Firefox, especially because assignments will be marked using Firefox.

If you choose to use another browser, do so at your own risk. Microsoft Internet Explorer is especially notorious for problems.

Text Editors

You will need the use of a text editor for this course.You can use something already available on your system, such as WordPad, emacs, vi, etc. You may also choose to download something which does syntax highlighting. Below are several editors.

Graphics Software

You will also likely need graphics software to work with image files for your web pages. Many operating systems already come with such software, e.g. Microsoft Paint, or perhaps you may already have something like Adobe Photoshop. If you need software, however, or simply desire something with more options than Paint, The GIMP is suggested. It is completely free and is a widely used image editor.

Python

Programming in this course will be done in the Python programming language. It is available for free for most operating systems.
*Note: If you are using Windows, you want the one that says "Python 2.4.2 Windows installer (Windows binary -- does not include source)"

Other Useful Software

Transferring Files

For this course you will have two options for transferring files:

  1. Use a secure file transfer program
  2. Use the upload/download application from the usermin on the course web server

The upload/download feature from usermin will not allow you to move or rename files. For this you will require the use of a secure transfer client or an SSH client. The course web server will not allow the use of FTP. You must have a client which supports SCP. The following programs are suggested.

Validating HTML

All of your html will have to be validated. Fortunately, there are programs that do this for you as well as indicate errors and warnings. You will be able to check your html before you submit it.