Originally sent as an email to registered students on 2012/06/27
Dear All,
I hope you're enjoying the summer months.
I have a few books that I hope you will start reading in preparation for the Web Application Development class this fall. I've also included below the entire reading list for the course if you're extra motivated or just can't wait to spend money on books.
The summer reading titles will give you two learn-to-program books, one done in Ruby and the other in JavaScript. Focus on the concepts & the vocab. We'll use both languages, with a twist, in Web App Dev: our primary framework will be Rails, and we'll be doing some neato UI/AJAX things with JavaScript (actually CoffeeScript). And then if you want to just see something awesome that your CSS background will prepare you for, start working with Sassy CSS/SCSS/"Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets". You can even redo your existing website's CSS as SCSS, compile it, and be awesome yourself.