CS190 The Web: Concepts and Technologies

How long can you survive without access to Web applications such as Facebook, Wikipedia, or Google? The Web now is central to our information society, and this course will be a guided tour through the concepts, ideas, and technology underlying the web's evolution into the modern ecosystem for commerce, information finding, and social interaction. We will also gain hands-on programming experience with key web applications such as search, online social networks, and web services. The assignments will primarily consist of lab exercises and group programming projects in which students will program Web2.0 services to do cool stuff. Although the course is self-contained and will explore both conceptual and practical topics, an interest in learning how to program and/or some previous exposure to programming would be quite helpful.

Course Topics (tentative):

• Web infrastructure: history, networking/protocols, hardware, energy

• The web browser story

• Search: history, algorithms, structure of the web, technology (implementation)

• Web applications: E-commerce, advertising

• Abuse: spam, hacking and the gray areas

• Web services: mashups (usage) and underlying technology

• Online Social Networks: influence, search, technology (implementation)

• Collaboration (Wikipedia)

• May cover additional topics related to search or social networks

• As long as you know how to put together a web page and have an interest in learning some web programming, you'll be OK.
• Some high-school-level trigonometry and statistics helpful.
• Additional experience and/or exposure to programming languages such as Java, Perl, Python or JavaScript would be helpful but not required: instructor will introduce necessary programming ideas and syntax as needed.

Group projects/homeworks (5-7 total): 70%
Final paper (instead of final exam): 20%
Class participation: 10%

• CrowdVine network: Facebook-lite social network for our class (moderated, publicly viewed)
   
• Blackboard forums: Restricted, for discussing and submitting assignments
   
• Twitter: #cs190 (RSS feed)