Welcome Letter

Hi Folks,

Welcome to Web Site Database Implementation. It’s my goal that this is one of the most helpful and important classes you’ll take in your academic career. Ambitious? Perhaps, but, if I didn’t think it was important, I wouldn’t be here.

Working with databases is one of the most valuable skills you can have as a web developer. It marks a major jump from making the equivalent of online posters to tools that can be made to run everything from CMS systems such as Wordpress and Sharepoint, eCommerce sites such as Amazon and Etsy, Social Media sites such as X and Facebook and even unmanned systems such as security, transportation and the “Internet of Things”. However, before we get ahead of ourselves, we have the next 10 weeks to get through.

My name is Dan Card. I’m an adjunct faculty member at UMass Lowell. Over the past 20+ years, I have developed education systems for middle and high school programs, created commercial software for the transportation and financial industries, created data visualizations for the NFL and MLB and built business applications for scientific organizations. Over the past 15 years, I’ve taught computer and technology classes on the Middle School, High School, Undergraduate and Adult levels.

We have a great deal of material to get through over the next 10 weeks. It’ll be work and we need to take it somewhat seriously but that is a far cry from taking ourselves very “somberly”. There is a difference and I hope we’ll do the former and not the latter.

The first step is to set up your development environment. This might take some time so make sure you block off enough and start early.

Sincerely,

Dan Card