CIT 597 Textbook and Resources
Fall 2009, David Matuszek

Textbooks

Murach's Java Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition
by Andrea Steelman, Joel Murach

Paperback: 758 pages
Publisher: Mike Murach & Associates
ISBN-10: 1890774448
ISBN-13: 978-1890774448
Price: $31.50 at Amazon

JavaScript: The Good Parts
by Douglas Crockford

Paperback: 170 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (September 1, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0596517742
ISBN-13: 978-0596517748
Price: $19.79 at Amazon

Also useful:

Programming the World Wide Web, 5th Edition by Robert W. Sebesta.
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.

Firefox 3.5: 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 will use Firefox. We will not use IE. We'll also want some extensions, most importantly Web Developer 1.1.8 and jsenv.
Eclipse: Probably the "Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers" is best.
Tomcat 6: This server is required to run Java servlets. Good installation instructions can be found at coreservlets.com.
Ruby and Rails: I suppose we will use Aptana Studio for this, but I'm waiting to see if a better option comes along. I prefer the standalone version rather than the Eclipse plugin; the plugin is too much "in my face" when I'm doing other things, such as Java.
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. Lately, I've been using Komodo Edit (Windows, Mac, and Linux) quite a lot. 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.