Digital Media

CAP4020 - Moshell - Spring 2000

407 823 5341, Moshell@cs.ucf.edu
Class Meetings - 10:00 to 11:15 Tuesday & Thursday, COMM 0114
Office Hours - 1 to 2 PM, Tue-Wed-Thur
Other hours by appointment

The Syllabus:

This course's web site is located at www.cs.ucf.edu/~moshell/CAP4020. Visit it often! On this web site, I have posted my notes on each lecture, including Queries which are questions you should know how to answer. They serve as the main basis for the midterm exam and final. I will attempt to update the web pages about a week ahead of their being lectured, to reflect any late breaking developments (or really lousy first-draft web pages from last time!)

This course has two main objectives:

You will need two textbooks. They should both be available from the campus bookstore or off-campus bookstores. If not, you can get them from www.amazon.com

PERL and CGI for the World Wide Web - Castro, Elizabeth. Peachpit Press, 1999.

Emerging Multimedia Computer Communication Technologies - Wu, C. H. and Irwin, J. D. Prentice Hall, 1998

You will be given a variety of additional readings - as much as possible, taken from the Web, so you won't have to get them from Reserve in the Library. But there will be some of those, too.

PERL and CGI. The lab work in this course is based on this book.  It's a very how-to book about programming in PERL. You'll be using a Unix based server at the Digital Media Lab, and so you need to learn some basic Unix operations.  It's a lot like DOS (shudder), at least from the user's viewpoint. Fortunately, Appendix D of this book walks you through some basic Unix commands.

Emerging Multimedia will be the primary source of technical content for the midterm and final exams. This is the first time we've used this book; it is a bit long on communications and short on the production and display ends of the overall "media pipeline"; but its contents are actually better distributed than its chapter titles would indicate. We will supplement the book with a number of readings on library reserve, as well as Web postings when legal and appropriate.

In the following list, C=Castro's CGI text;  and W=Wu & Irwin's text. As you can see, we mostly do nuts-and-bolts CGI stuff on Tuesdays, and theoretical stuff on Thursdays. The "Due" column tells you what you must have ready by that week (labs, takehome midterm, etc.)

The Lab Projects' URLs are to be mailed to me during the Saturday-Monday before the Tuesday class of the designated Due Week.

Digital Media - CAP4020 - Spring 2000 - Moshell - Schedule

Monday Tuesday's Topic Thursday's Topic Due (Tue/Thur)
3-Jan-00 --class didn't start yet   W1: Introduction
10-Jan-00 C1,2: CGI Introduced W2: Multimedia Tech.
17-Jan-00 C3-10: Basics W2 Continues
24-Jan-00 C11:Patterns;CGI.pm W3: Compression
 
31-Jan-00 More CGI.pm W3 Continues Lab 1 in.
7-Feb-00 C12: Cookies W4: LANs
14-Feb-00 D4: Shared Vworlds W5:ATM
21-Feb-00 Intro to Graphics W6: WANs MTX Out
28-Feb-00 VRML&Scene Graphs W7: Internet
6-Mar-00 Microsoft's DirectX W7 Continues MTX, L2n
13-Mar-00 Spring Break!!! ...we all go away...
20-Mar-00 <Guest lecturer> W8: Broadband Gotta find one...
 
27-Mar-00 Public Key Encryption Internet Security
3-Apr-00 Internet Entrepreneurship Cold Fusion Chip Wiggins, Guest
10-Apr-00  W9: MM on Net W10: Video Conf.
17-Apr-00 Shared Virtual Worlds W11:Applications L3 in.
24-Apr-00 Final Exams
The topics listed in ITALICS above provide opportunities for students who want to make presentations, which will earn credit toward final exam questions. If nobody steps forward, I'll do them myself. The Bold items are guest lectures, since I'll be in Holland the week of 3 April.

Grades will be based on the following model:

Lab 1: 10%

Lab 2: 10%

Lab 3: 25%

Midterm Exam (Take-Home) 25%

Final Exam (In-class) 20%

Participation 10%. <-- The best way to get these points is to SHOW UP FOR CLASS every day, and to DO THE ASSIGNED HOMEWORK, and to COME SEE ME IN OFFICE HOURS if you don't understand a concept or cannot do the homework.