CIT 597 Textbook and Resources
Fall 2008, David Matuszek

Textbooks

Programming the World Wide Web, 4th Edition (Paperback)
by Robert W. Sebesta

Paperback: 752 pages
Addison Wesley; 4 edition (August 17, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0321489691
ISBN-13: 978-0321489692

I cover a lot of different topics in CIT 597. Consequently, it is very difficult to find a single textbook for this course. This book is the best I've found. Happily, it's also well-written.

For more in-depth coverage, consider:

Murach's Java Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition by Joel Murach and Andrea Steelman.
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.
Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz.

Software

Because CIT 597 covers so many different technologies, we also need a lot of different software for the course. Fortunately, I've found two bundles, EasyEclipse for LAMP and XAMPP, that cover (almost) all our programming needs.

Firefox 3: Since we will be working on the Web, we need a browser. The main browsers in use today are Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera (see this page for a subjective view of the differences). We'll also want some extensions, most importantly Web Developer 1.1.6 and jsenv.
EasyEclipse for LAMP: This software bundle contains Eclipse and all the plugins needed to develop in PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, and Ruby On Rails. It isn't the most recent version of Eclipse, but it's fairly up to date. If you want the absolute latest versions of everything, you can collect and install the pieces individually--but be wary of version incompatibilities.
XAMPP: This bundle contains everything you need on the server side, except Tomcat.
Tomcat: This one additional program is required to run Java servlets. Good installation instructions can be found at coreservlets.com.
A good text editor: Notepad sucks. Make your life easier by getting and learning a decent text editor. Two of my favorites are Notepad++ (Windows only) and jEdit (platform independent), but many people like TextPad (Windows). On the Mac, TextWrangler is also popular. All of these are free.

Web Resources

There are a large number of tutorials and "cheat sheets" available on the Web. Here are some of them; you should look for additional ones as needed.

W3 Schools: Short tutorials on just about everything. Highly recommended.
tizag Tutorials: Longer tutorials on a variety of topics.
HTML, CSS, PHP, and More Cheat Sheets
Cheat Sheet Roundup: Ajax, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby...
A Concise Introduction to JavaScript, Part I: The Core Language: My own attempt at summarizing the important parts of the JavaScript language.
A Concise Introduction to JavaScript, Part II: Client-side JavaScript: Additional JavaScript needed for writing DHTML pages.