66-272: Application Design & Development
Carnegie Mellon University -- Fall 2000
Professors Larry Heimann & Jiming Liu

Course Nature and Goals: According to the official description, this course helps students understand the design process and provides them with the concepts needed to design and develop effective software applications. The student will gain background in applying a user-centered design process through the development of a prototype application. Topics include user-centered design and development; data storage and manipulation; structured query languages; and the development of web-based applications.

Students should note that this course is not a programming class designed to make them fluent in one specific language. The goal of this course is to help students develop competency with several key technologies used in web development and e-commerce and to provide them with the principles needed to make effective use of these technologies. To that end, lectures each week will focus on conceptual issues and principles for using and applying IS technologies. Lab sections are conducted each week to demonstrate the application of these technologies and give students a opportunity to do some simple exercises.

Grades: Grades in this course are determined by student performance in five areas: take-home lab assignments (10%), midterm exam (25%), final exam (30%), and the course project (35%). Final course grades will be determined based on a fixed 90/A -- 80/B -- 70/C -- 65/D scale.

The purpose of the take-home lab assignments is two-fold. First, it should give students an opportunity to put into practice what they are learning. Second, it gives students some type of barometer of how they are doing in the course. As a barometer measure it can be misleading if students get most or all of their source code from friends or the web. Since it is only 10 percent of the grade, students should seek to do their own work on these labs. Labs are graded on check/check-minus system for satisfactory and less-than-satisfactory products. The first check-minus will not hurt a student, but every check-minus after that will result in a half-point loss in the lab grade. Missed labs are an automatic 1 point loss in lab grade.

Exams and the course assignments are designed to be completed by individuals without the assistance of classmates or other students. We have made a separate statement regarding the cheating policy in this course and suggest that students review this policy as soon as possible. We consider academic integrity to be of great importance, we actively scan for cheating policy violations, and will take appropriate measures against those who fail to abide by these standards.

Details on the course project can be found on a separate page. Being able to deliver work products on time is important in the world of information systems, and for that reason we will be firm on the deadlines associated with class assignments. All labs assignments and each phase of the course project will be due no later than 5:00pm on the date specified (all labs are due the Friday of the week assigned). Any project phase or lab assignment turned in after 5:00pm will receive an automatic 10 percent penalty per day late. Assignments more than four days late will not be accepted without a special exemption from the professors. Assignments may be turned in early, but cannot be turned in more than once.

Readings: In this class we have assigned two books which can be purchased at the CMU bookstore or online. (check bestbookbuys.com for good online deals)

  • Building Dynamic HTML GUIs by Champeon and Fox
  • Fast Track Web Programming by Cintron

These two texts should provide a basic reference library for students in this course. Students who want texts which cover 66-272 subjects in more detail may wish to consider the following books:

  • The Design of Everyday Things
  • Beginning Active Server Pages or Professional Active Server Pages from Wrox Press (depending on your level of prior experience with ASP or VB/VBScript)
  • The Practical Sql Handbook: Using Structured Query Language
  • Learning Perl or Programming Perl from O'Reilly Press (Warning: Perl 6.0 is in progress so the lifespan of the Programming Perl book is probably only a year or so.)

One reason that we have only one required the two texts (instead of all six) is that there is a good deal of instructional material available on the internet at no charge. We have created a series of page which help students find this material. The listings are by no means complete, however, and students who find additional links that are useful are invited to e-mail the link to Professor Heimann for inclusion at this site.

Schedule: Below is a listing of the lectures and labs for each week, as well as the due dates for assignments. Assignments are due at 5pm on the Friday of that week, unless the Friday is a holiday in which case it will be due on Thursday at 5pm. Also note that the university schedule this semester has 16 Tuesday dates (more than any other day) and the last lecture will be used to either make up material (if instructors fall behind) or as a review/summary session.
Wk   Lecture     Lab     Assignments  
01 Introduction, Design Principles HTML forms/CSS Lab 1
02 GUI Design Process JavaScript Intro Lab 2
03 More on Interface Design form validation Lab 3
04 Information Architecture more JavaScript Phase 1 due
05 RDB/Normalization Access tables & relations lab 4
06 SQL I SQL exercises Phase 2 due
07 SQL II SQL exercises Lab 5
08 Midterm Exam Graphics Phase 3 due
09 ASP Overview ASP 1 Lab 6
10 ADO Overview ASP 2 Lab 7
11 ASP topics ASP 3 Phase 4 due
12 Intro to CGI ASP 4 Lab 8
13 Introduction to Perl no lab -- holiday break Lab 9
14 Perl Perl 1 Phase 5 due
15 Usability Testing Perl 2 Phase 6 due

Faculty Information: Each professor maintains office hours that are run strictly on a first come, first served basis. However, we are both available for appointments on other days and welcome students to stop in at other times without an appointment; if we are busy with something else at the moment then we will set up an appointment with you to talk at a more convenient time. Contact information for each professor is listed below:

    Professor Heimann     Professor Liu  
Office:   Porter 319E   Porter 208G
Phone:   8-8211   TBA
E-mail:   lheimann@andrew.cmu.edu   jliu@commerbuilder.com
Office Hrs:   M 9:30-11, 1-2:30   TBA

Teaching Assistants: There are many undergraduate teaching assistants available to help you with this material. TAs do not have set office hours, but may be contacted via e-mail (appointments for F2F meetings can be set via e-mail). If you have a question or need help debugging code, please send your request to one of the following e-mail addresses:

These e-mail accounts should be checked by a TA or professor on a regular basis. If you do not get a response from an e-mail request within a reasonable period of time, contact the Head TA (Tara Dwivedi at tdwivedi@andrew.cmu.edu) for assistance. If this does not bring about an appropriate response, please inform one of the professors and we will handle the matter from there.

Instructors reserve the right to make modifications to materials in this syllabus during the term as circumstances warrant.

 

Please note: this site contains relevant information for the Fall 2000 semester only. The site is maintained by Professor H, so any questions or problems with these pages should be sent to lheimann@andrew.cmu.edu.

 

 

       
  You have been visiting:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/66-272/272syllabusF2000.html
A link back to the main CMU page
I know, like you really need or care about it.
Just tryin' to be a good CMU citizen here...		 Wonderful hack news site!   Quchta' joH Yahweh HoSwIj.