Software Engineering for Internet Applications | Hacker News Reader

Software Engineering for Internet Applications

philip.greenspun.com

47 pointspius10 comments

Wow, this is awesome! Many CS grads I've worked with before had little experience of any web technologies or concepts coming out of school, which makes it that much harder to get them up to speed. I quickly realized I can't take for granted that someone would know source code version control, or understand protocols like HTTP and POP3 or how to telnet into them for debugging. Definitely bookmarking this for future use!

After all these years, this is still on my PDA. And this:

http://www.amazon.com/Philip-Alexs-Guide-Web-Publishing/dp/1...

is still on my coffee table.

(I'm still trying to figure out which chapters the dog wrote.)

An oldie but goodie.

I always found his attachment to AOL and Oracle kinda strange. I imagine that if this was written today, open source tools would be featured more.

Oracle has been replaced by Postgres. AOLServer is still going strong, but I guess it's not sexy enough to compete with RoR et al.

This particular book was just finished two or three years ago, although it builds upon materials written in the 1990's.

It seems his attachment to AOLServer and Oracle are because they still work, and he personally has no reason to switch.

Most of what I know about web programming I learned from Philip, though I have had only brief exposure to AOLServer and Oracle. What he's teaching transcends particular technologies, and it's fairly straightforward to apply it to, say, Apache+Python and PostGreSQL.

Hey, AOLserver is open source. At the time it was the only web server with a built-in glue language (Tcl) and pooled database connections. It got me excited about web programming. Plus, the sheer amount of code already written was fantastic.

I never understood why people were put off by his favoritism to those tools. ACS was all about page flow and user experience, and in that department, got it right more often than not.

Nice to see that HN still remembers philg.

Although, as someone who took the first draft of this course in 2001, I certainly wish I had submitted the link and got the karma for myself :).

Haha, nice.

I took it in 2003, but had to drop it a few weeks in . . . started that term with 90-something units and was running for UA President. 8(

I recall now that I actually coded our final project in the (ha ha) AOLServer Python API:

http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=73022978418185&mkt=...

(real website down, check back later I guess...)

This isn't news... this has been around forever. But, it is still awsome none the less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com