e-Business & e-Commerce How to Program Preface

Teaching Approach

E-Business and e-Commerce How to Program contains a rich collection of examples, exercises, and projects drawn from many fields to provide the student with a chance to solve interesting real-world problems. The book concentrates on the principles of good software engineering and stresses program clarity. We avoid arcane terminology and syntax specifications in favor of teaching by example. The book is written by educators who spend most of their time writing about, and teaching, edge-of-the-practice programming topics in industry

classrooms worldwide for Deitel & Associates, Inc. The text emphasizes good pedagogy.

Live-Code Teaching Approach

The book is loaded with hundreds of live-code examples. This is the focus of the way we teach and write about programming, and the focus of each of our multimedia Cyber Classrooms as well. Each new concept is presented in the context of a complete, working program immediately followed by one or more windows showing the program’s input/output dialog. We call this style of teaching and writing our live-code approach. We use programming languages to teach programming languages. Reading these programs is much like entering

and running them on a computer.

E-Business and e-Commerce How to Program first explains cutting-edge technologies and business models that are changing the way commerce is conducted, then shows how to create e-business Web sites starting with HTML programming, then rapidly proceeding toprogramming in JavaScript, Microsoft’s Dynamic HTML, VBScript, Perl and XML. Students really want to “cut to the chase.” There is great stuff to be done in all these languages, so let’s get right to it! Web programming is not trivial by any means, but it’s fun and students can see immediate results. Students can get graphical, animated, multimedia-based, audio intensive,database-intensive, network-based programs running quickly through “reusable components.” They can implement impressive projects. They can be much more creative and productive in a one- or two-semester course than is possible in introductory courses taught in conventional programming languages such as C, C++, and even Visual Basic or Java.

World Wide Web Access

All of the code for e-Business and e-Commerce How to Program (and our other publications) is on the Internet free for download at the Deitel & Associates, Inc. Web site www.deitel.com.

Please download all the code then run each program as you read the text. Make changes to the code examples and immediately see the effects of those changes. It’s a great way to learn programming. [Note: You must respect the fact that this is copyrighted material. Feel free to use it as you study, but you may not republish any portion of it in any form without explicit permission from Prentice Hall and the authors.]

Objectives

Each chapter begins with a statement of Objectives. This tells students what to expect and gives them an opportunity, after reading the chapter, to determine if they have met these objectives. It is a confidence builder and a source of positive reinforcement.

Quotations

The learning objectives are followed by quotations. Some are humorous, some are philosophical, and some offer interesting insights. Our students enjoy relating the quotations to the chapter material. Many of the quotations are worth a “second look” after you read each chapter.

Outline

The chapter Outline helps students approach the material in top-down fashion. This, too, helps students anticipate what is to come and set a comfortable and effective learning pace.

14120 Lines of Code in 258 Example Web Pages (with Program Outputs)

We present features in the context of complete, working Web pages. This is the focus of our teaching and our writing. We call it our “live-code” approach. Each Web document is followed by the outputs produced when the document is rendered in a Web browser (We use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5) and its scripts are executed. This enables students to confirm that the Web pages are rendered as expected. Reading the book carefully is much like entering and running these programs on a computer. The programs range from just a few lines of code to substantial examples with several hundred lines of code. Students should download all the code for the book from our Web site, and run each program while studying that program in the text. The Web documents are available on the CD accompanying this book and at www.deitel.com..

554 Illustrations/Figures

An abundance of charts, line drawings and program outputs is included. The discussion of control structures, for example, features carefully drawn flowcharts. [Note: We do not teach flowcharting as a program development tool, but we do use a brief, flowchart-oriented presentation to specify the precise operation of JavaScript’s control structures.]

355 Programming Tips

We have included programming tips to help students focus on important aspects of program development. We highlight hundreds of these tips in the form of Good Programming Practices,Common Programming Errors, Testing and Debugging Tips, Performance Tips,Portability Tips, Software Engineering Observations and Look-and-Feel Observations.

These tips and practices represent the best we have gleaned from a total of almost eight decades of programming and teaching experience. One of our students—a mathematics major—told us that she feels this approach is like the highlighting of axioms, theorems and corollaries in mathematics books; it provides a foundation on which to build good software.

\ 83 Good Programming Practices

Good Programming Practices are highlighted in the text. They call the students attention to techniques that help produce better programs. When we teach introductory courses to nonprogrammers ,we state that the “buzzword” of each course is “clarity,” and we tell the students that we will highlight (in these Good Programming Practices) techniques for writing programs that are clearer, more understandable and more maintainable.

95 Common Programming Errors

Students learning a language—especially in their first programming course—tend to make certain kinds of errors frequently. Focusing on these Common Programming Errors helps students avoid making the same errors. It also helps reduce long lines outside instructors’offices during office hours!

28 Performance Tips

In our experience, teaching students to write clear and understandable programs is by far the most important goal for a first programming course. But students want to write the programs that run the fastest, use the least memory, require the smallest number of keystrokes, or dazzle in other nifty ways. Students really care about performance. They want to know what they can do to “turbo charge” their programs. So we have include Performance Tips

to highlight opportunities for improving program performance.

23 Portability Tips

Software development is a complex and expensive activity. Organizations that develop software must often produce versions customized to a variety of computers and operating systems.

So there is a strong emphasis today on portability, i.e., on producing software that will run on a variety of computer systems with few, if any, changes. Achieving portability requires careful and cautious design. There are many pitfalls. We include numerous Portability Tips to help students write portable code.

79 Software Engineering Observations

The Software Engineering Observations highlight techniques, architectural issues and designissues, etc. that affect the architecture and construction of software systems, especially large-scale systems. Much of what the student learns here will be useful in upper-level courses and in industry as the student begins to work with large, complex real-world systems.

29 Testing and Debugging Tips

This “tip type” may be misnamed. When we first decided to incorporate Testing and Debugging Tips, we thought these tips would be suggestions for testing programs to expose bugs and suggestions for removing those bugs. In fact, most of these tips tend to be observations about capabilities and features that prevent bugs from getting into programs in the first place.

18 Look-and-Feel Observations

We provide Look-and-Feel Observations to highlight graphical user interface (GUI) conventions.These observations help students design their own graphical user interfaces to conform with industry norms.

Summary (1420 Summary bullets)

Each chapter ends with additional pedagogical devices. We present a thorough, bullet-liststyle Summary of the chapter. On average, there are 42 summary bullets per chapter. This helps the students review and reinforce key concepts.

Terminology (2751 Terms)

We include in a Terminology section an alphabetized list of the important terms defined in the chapter—again, further reinforcement. On average, there are 81 terms per chapter.

607 Self-Review Exercises and Answers (Count Includes Separate Parts)

Extensive self-review exercises and answers are included for self-study. This gives the student a chance to build confidence with the material and prepare for the regular exercises. Students should attempt all the self-review exercises and check their answers.

658 Exercises (Solutions in Instructor’s Manual; Count Includes Separate Parts)

Each chapter concludes with a substantial set of exercises including simple recall of important terminology and concepts; writing individual statements; writing small portions of Web pages and scripts; writing complete Web pages and Web-based e-businesses; and writing major term projects. The large number of exercises across a wide variety of areas enables instructors to tailor their courses to the unique needs of their audiences and to vary

course assignments each semester. Instructors can use these exercises to form homework assignments, short quizzes and major examinations. The solutions for most of the exercises are included in the Instructor’s Manual and on the disks available only to instructors through their Prentice-Hall representatives. [NOTE: Please do not write to us requesting the instructor’s manual. Distribution of this publication is strictly limited to college professors teaching from the book. Instructors may obtain the solutions manual only from their regular Prentice Hall representatives. We regret that we cannot provide the solutions to professionals.] Solutions to approximately half of the exercises are included on the e-Business and e-Commerce Programming Multimedia Cyber Classroom CD

(available in bookstores and computer stores; please see the last few pages of this book orvisit our Web site at www.deitel.com for ordering instructions).

Approximately 6000 Index Entries (with approximately 8100 Page References)

We have included an extensive Index at the back of the book. This helps the student find any term or concept by keyword. The Index is useful to people reading the book for the first time and is especially useful to practicing programmers who use the book as a reference.

The terms in the Terminology sections generally appear in the Index (along with many more index items from each chapter). Students can use the Index in conjunction with the Terminology sections to be sure they have covered the key material of each chapter.

“Double Indexing” of All Live-Code Examples and Exercises

e-Business and e-Commerce How to Program has 258 live-code examples and 658 exercises (including parts). Many of the exercises are challenging problems or projects requiring substantial effort. We have “double indexed” each of the live-code examples and most of the more challenging projects. For every source-code program in the book, we took the figure caption and indexed it both alphabetically and as a subindex item under “Examples.”

This makes it easier to find examples using particular features. The more substantial exercises are indexed both alphabetically and as subindex items under “Exercises.”

Bibliography

An extensive bibliography of books, articles and online documentation is included to encourage

further reading.