Home : Bootcamp preparation
This page describes things you can do before arriving at bootcamp in order to ensure that you hit the ground running. These fall into two categories: Coming up to speed on fundamental technology, and reading ahead.
On top of that, if you don't already have access to Unix, then getting access would be more trouble than it's worth. And if you do have access, then you probably already know enough Unix already.
Besides, if you ever get stuck with a Unix problem at bootcamp, you
can always ask the guru sitting at the next console.
[see also Colin Roald's utilities.tcl
cheat sheet. -- rgr, 14-Oct-99.]
[download instructions. -- rgr, 26-Sep-99.] [look at the Tcl
material on
http://www.primenet.com/~cohen/arsdigita/problem_set_zero.html
(dead link) David Cohen's "Problem Set Zero" page. -- rgr,
2-Oct-99.]
Once you have access to a working Tcl interpreter, you could consider
doing the first excercise of Problem Set 1.
What do all those <h1> and <ol> things
mean? For a quick reference to HTML, check out The Bare Bones Guide
to HTML. Be sure to stay away from markup tags labelled "4.0" and
"MS"; not all browsers will support these. This guide also has extensive links to other
resources.
The Tcl programming language
It is not strictly necessary to tackle Tcl before the bootcamp, since
Tcl is quite a compact language, so it is possible to learn quickly.
However, most people also find Tcl an ugly little runt of a language,
full of odd syntax rules and semantic gotchas. This makes the early
part of the learning curve quite steep, so if you can get past that
point before arriving at bootcamp, you will be well ahead of the game.
The HTML markup language
HTML is not hard to play with; you can edit HTML files (preferably in emacs), save them to disk, and then use your
browser's "file:" pseudo-URL syntax to see how they look. You
could start by saving this page locally, and improving the formatting in
your copy. (This shouldn't be too hard.)
The SQL database query sublanguage
Like Unix, getting to the point where you can
actually use SQL before arriving at bootcamp is not worth the trouble.
Just skim SQL for Web Nerds if you
want some idea of what you need to know. (Don't try to read anything
else; the other books on SQL I've seen either cover too much
information, or do not cover the right version of Oracle, or both.)
Hints on problem sets
Reading materials
From the bottom of the Software Engineering
for Web Applications (6.916) page.
Free stuff
Not-free stuff that you might want to buy
Bob Rogers
<rogers@darwin.bu.edu>
Last modified: Fri Apr 30 22:49:36 EDT 2004