This page is dedicated to providing you with helpful links. When I first began to work in HTML and CSS one of the questions I had is “Where can I go to find out more information?” Obviously, using a Search Engine like Google is a great option, but here are a few additional websites you might find helpful.
HTML/CSS REFERENCE LINKS
If you’re looking at these links for the first time, don’t get nervous! It’ll all make sense to you pretty soon.
As you know, you’ll be expected to understand the fundamentals of the Web beyond just what you learn in class – specifically, you will be expected to understand and write basic Web pages yourself.
While we’ll cover the basics of how to do this in class, an absolutely invaluable resource will be Lynda.com. Here’s a perfect Lynda course that fits with our class content: Web Technology Fundamentals. I strongly recommend you watch these videos, especially the ones that deal directly with HTML and CSS (Chapter 2).
Of course, to learn how to code, you need a program to write code in! Our recommended program is called Brackets, and it can be found at brackets.io. It works on a PC and a Mac, it’s free, and it doesn’t take up much disk space. Please download and launch the program on your own computer, if you have one available for coding.
Many of you will be writing your code on campus in a computer lab, and all of the labs in McEwen have Brackets installed. In fact, we made an attempt to install Brackets on every publicly available computer on campus, but ran into issues with the PCs in the library – but other than that one instance, you should find the program on every Mac on campus!
If you ware working on a personal computer, you’ll also need an FTP program. FTP programs are free (or at least they should be), and the simpler they are, the better. Two that we recommend, and that are already installed on every lab computer, are Cyberduck and Fetch. Cyberduck is available for both PC and Mac; Fetch is Mac-only. There are other FTP programs available (and FTP functionality is built into many applications, such as Dreamweaver), but these are the easiest ones to use.
The Web evolves as a media platform far faster than any other (film, television, print, you name it), hence, writing/reading books on the subject is often a problem of getting them published before the technology has changed. As a result, we’ve done two things for this class: require a great introductory textbook that covers general concepts that do not change that frequently, and use a combination of reading materials on hold at the library and Web links to online content pertaining to Web design. The setup is not as convenient as a ‘one class, one book’ arrangement, but it shouldn’t be a problem.
Your textbook, Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics, by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, is available as a book, e-book, or PDF (it’s also available in the library, but only in an earlier edition, which is not recommended). This is a great book, you should use it! The book also has a very useful Website, which includes examples from the book (it’s much easier to use / see the examples in the book by downloading them from the Website) and links to everything mentioned.
In addition, the following titles are on hold at the library for your class:
Already available on our Moodle class site are the first few chapters of Tapworthy , by Josh Clark. Your instructor will reference these books and recommend relevant chapters as the semester proceeds.
While an external hard drive is required for the course, there is no need to bring it to class, unless you have a laptop to plug it in to. The hard drive is required because our on-campus lab computers ‘reset’ all their content when you log out, meaning anything you save to the desktop, say, would be gone when you log back in. External hard drives also make it much easier for you to work from anywhere, regardless of if you have a laptop. If anyone needs recommendations on purchasing an external hard drive, please get in touch with your professor.