INDEX

Class Web page
Course Description
Teaching Staff
Audience and Prerequisites
Logistics
Course Texts
Project
Homework assignments
Grading
Computer facilities
Academic Integrity
Class outline
Acknowledgments

CLASS WEB PAGE

The class Web page is http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~vassalos/class/IIT. You can find a link to this document and all other course material there. This syllabus can be obtained directly as: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~vassalos/class/IIT/syllabus.html.  Note that this and the course outline page are ``living documents''; they can be expected to change during the quarter, and the "official'' contents are whatever the on-line version has, not the hardcopy handed out at the beginning of the course. You are encouraged to visit the class web page often!

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Information and Internet Technologies introduces the technical concepts underlying current and future information systems, with an emphasis on internet-related technologies. The course begins with the fundamentals of computer systems, databases, and networking. Then special emphasis is given to technologies that underlie the World Wide Web and E-commerce, including HTML, XML, emerging interoperability standards, security, search, information retrieval, agent technologies, data warehousing, and data mining.

Information and Internet Technologies provides both a refresher to the basics as well as coverage of cutting edge technologies. Students will gain an understanding of how modern information systems work, as well as exposure to powerful high level tools that allow us to take advantage of computer power without having to write conventional computer programs.

TEACHING STAFF
 

Person	Role	Office	Phone	Office Hours	Email
Vasilis Vassalos	Instructor	KMEC 9-82	998-0843	TuTh 7:15-8:15pm, other times by appt	vassalos@stern.nyu.edu
Ramesh Sankaranarayanan	Grader	KMEC 9-172			rsankara@stern.nyu.edu
Yvonne Perez	Secretary	KMEC 9-170	998-0802	N/A	yperez@stern.nyu.edu

AUDIENCE AND PREREQUISITES

Stern students headed for jobs in consulting, marketing, and finance will find that a basic understanding of how computers work will pay subtle and unexpected dividends throughout their careers. Information Technology and Operations Management majors will benefit from a refresher on the basics and exposure to new technology trends such as OLAP, XML technology, security, and search technologies. The course is also suitable for other students who wish to deepen their knowledge of how computer technology works through a single, practically oriented course.

B20.2317 is an introductory course. It is assumed that students know how to use word processors and spreadsheets. It is also assumed that students have access to email and the WWW.  No knowledge of how computers work or are programmed is assumed. Students with a Computer Science background or those who have recently completed courses in computer architecture, operating systems, databases and computer networks will find the first half of the course elementary, since it consists of highlights of those four topics. Student backgrounds vary considerably, however. Students with some background in electrical engineering or programming will breeze through certain topics. Those with no background will have to work harder, but mastery of this material is within reach of every Stern student regardless of background.

Talk to the instructor if you're not sure whether your background is appropriate.

LOGISTICS

1) Lectures. Tuesday and Thursday 5:30-6:50pm in KMC 4-60
2) Recitation. We will run 1 recitation session to review material before the final.
3) Class newsgroup. B20-2317@egroups.com. An eGroup provides the functionality of both a mailing list and a newsgroup: messages are posted and archived but also delivered to the mailboxes of the eGroup members. Please sign up for the eGroup. The instructions for signup can be found here. Student participation is encouraged; messages should be of general interest to the class.
4) Communication with instructor and TA. Office hours are mentioned above. Other times with appointment. Email is encouraged! The subject of all class-related, non-egroup emails to the instructor and the TA should start with [b20.2317].

LECTURE NOTES AND TEXTBOOKS

Required materials

Lecture notes are Powerpoint slides used by the instructor during lectures. They are fairly detailed and comprehensive. Lecture slides can be downloaded from the class web page.
The required texts for the course are the following:

• How computers work: Millennium Edition, Ron White, Que, 1999.
• How the internet works: Millennium Edition, Preston Gralla, Que, 1999.

• Client/Server Survival Guide, 3rd Edition,  Robert Orfali, Dan Harkey, and Jeri Edwards, John Wiley & Sons, 1999.

• Advantage Interactive Software Tutorial CD - Microsoft Access97, by Hutchinson and Coulthard, MindQ Publishing.

• Price Waterhouse's Technology Forecast: 1999 is available at the NYU Professional Bookstore. In addition to a concise technical introduction to the various topics covered, it provides excellent surveys of the marketplace, including pointers to leading vendors and products, as well as assessments of trends and directions.  Students with no previous exposure in IT might find this a bit heavy. On the other hand, students who have had some previous IT exposure and especially MBA students who are interested in connecting the technological principles we will learn in the lectures with the marketplace will find this an excellent reference.

• The PC Webopedia (http:// www.pcwebopedia.com) is a Web site that serves as an encyclopedia of Information Technology terms. It provides excellent explanations of Information Technology terms, together with links to additional web pages related to them. For each lecture, the course Web page contains pointers to the relevant category of the PC Webopedia. We strongly encourage you to use this valuable resource to clarify unanswered questions and to go beyond the material covered in class, according to your own personal interests.

• The Software Technology Review (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str) at the CMU Software Engineering Institute is a directed guide containing the latest information on approximately 63 software technologies. As with the PC Webopedia, we strongly encourage you to use this resource for definitions and explanations of terms mentioned in course lectures and to go beyond the material covered in class if you wish.

• Dictionary of PC hardware and Data Communication Terms is the online version of a very well written, out of print book by Mitchell Shnier. It also provides excellent explanations of several hardware and communication-related terms, from the well-known (BIOS) to the obscure (Speedo). Explanations are often more low level than the PC Webopedia (compare TCP with TCP).

• Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing is the online version of a very well-written book on database-backed, collaborative web sites and services. Does it sound like a niche? It's not, almost all the sites and services of any value are database-backed. It can get technical, but the main ideas are excellent and you can always skip the code. Caveat: Philip does not care much for traditional businesses and for many of their executives (but his attitude is not worse than Dilbert's).

• Other books in the How things work series from MacMillan Computer Pub, especially the following:
• How networks work, 4h Edition, Frank J. Derfler, Que, 1998.
• How intranets work, Preston Gralla, Que, 1996.

• In Business with Access, Jeffry Byrne, Prentice Hall Computer Books,1996. Good, concise introduction to Microsoft Access. Students who want to go into more depth, please see next books.

• Access Database Design & Programming, Steven Roman, Ron Petrusha (Editor), O'Reilly, 1999. This very good book places more emphasis on Access programming using Visual Basic.

• Running Microsoft Access 97, John L. Viescas, Microsoft Press, 1997. One of the best and most detailed "bibles" on Microsoft Access. This is an excellent reference book for students who are interested in becoming Microsoft Access experts. If you are looking for something more concise, you may consider the Byrne book.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Project: Students will pick a company/product/technology that they believe will be important in the near future and make a case for it, by writing a report and giving a class presentation. The class will rate the choices (think ice-skating competition), and the class "vote" will be 25% of the project grade.

Homework assignments are due in class on the due dates. No late homeworks will be accepted.  However, each student is allowed one extension of at most 48 hours. This amount of time cannot be divided among assignments;  it applies to one assignment only.

Grading is based on class participation, homeworks, a midterm exam, a final exam, and a project.
 

Class participation is included in grade computations in order to to encourage students to help make this course more interactive (and thus more effective and fun). The focus is on getting students to come to class prepared, ask interesting and relevant questions and give brief and concise answers to posed questions. In addition, students are encouraged to do follow-up research in order to answer questions that come up in class, or to locate relevant articles and bring them to class for distribution. Finally, students are encouraged to exchange ideas on the class egroup.

COMPUTER FACILITIES

This is a course about Information Technology and several assignments require use of a PC. Students can use either their own PC or the facilities of the Stern School. Please read the university policies on the use of university computer and network resources. Take them seriously -  we do.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

You are encouraged to discuss material from the class with other students, including material related to problem sets. You must, however, write solutions independently. The time to stop collaborating is when you start writing. In addition, you must acknowledge the help you got on your homework assignments.

Any other assistance by another person constitutes a violation of the student code of conduct and will be treated as such.

Do: discuss general concepts and techniques for performing the assignments; compare and discuss answers after you get the assignments back.
Don't: copy or compare answers before you turn them in; sit together while you are writing up your solutions.

Finally, it is strictly forbidden to consult and/ or copy your answers from solution sets of past terms.

If you have any questions about what this policy means, please discuss the matter with the instructor now.

SCHEDULE OF CLASSES
# Day Date Topic

How a computer works: Hardware, OS, and Software
1 Tu  Jan 18 Introduction

2   Th  Jan 20  How computers work I
Readings: Parts I and III of White, pp 136-151, 161-167 of Part IV and pp. 186-195, 201-219 of Part V.
3   Tu  Jan 25  How computers work II; Class cancelled due to weather
Readings: Same as above
4   Th  Jan 27 How computers work II;
Readings: Same as above
5   Tu  Feb 1   Operating System Principles
Readings: Part II of White
Recommended: Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX
6   Th  Feb 3   Programming concepts; Representations
Readings: Same as above
7   Tu Feb 8    Programming languages, software development methodologies
Readings: Class notes
Recommended: The business case for open source software, the rest of opensource.org

Database Management Systems

8   Th Feb 10  What is a DBMS? Relational Databases;
Readings: pp 84-89 of  White, ch 10 of Orfali et al.
9   Tu Feb 15  Relational database design;
Readings: Same as above; SQL tutorial at http://photo.net/sql/ or at http://w3.one.net/~jhoffman/sqltut.html
10 Th Feb 17  Asking queries using SQL;
Readings: Same as above
11 Tu Feb 22  Asking queries using SQL; Using Microsoft Access
Readings: Same as above
Recommended: Access book
12 Th Feb 24 DBMS architecture; Transactions; Price/Performance issues
Readings: Chapter 15 of Orfali et al.
13 Tu Feb 29 Online Transaction Processing; Online Analytical Processing; Data Warehouses;
Readings: Chapter 12 of Orfali et al.
Recommended: Data warehousing for cavemen, Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence, Data warehouses, ad hoc query tools and other ways to destroy your company
14 Th Mar 2  Personalization technologies;
Readings:  User tracking (from the paragraph "personalization" till the end)
Recommended: Personalization is overrated
15 Tu Mar 7  Data mining and Decision Support Invited Speaker: Professor Vasant Dhar
Readings: Chapter 13 of Orfali et al., The KDD Process for Extracting Useful Knowledge from Volumes of Data (only available from the nyu.edu domain)
Recommended: Mining business databases, The data warehouse and data mining (only available from the nyu.edu domain)
16 Th Mar 9    Midtem exam - in class

[[Spring Break]]

17 Tu Mar 21  Information Retrieval and Search Engines
Readings: Hypersearching the Web
Recommended: Mediating and metasearching on the internet, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Web size statistics, Accessibility of information on the Web
18 Th Mar 23  Search engines continued

Communication Networks and Protocols
19 Tu Mar 28 Data transmission; Ethernet; Local Area Networks; Wide Area Networks
Readings: Chapters 12,15 of Gralla, Chapter 37 of White, Chapter 4 of Orfali et al.
Recommended: Chapter 27 of White, Chapters 13,14,16 of Gralla
20 Th Mar 30  TCP/IP; the Internet; The World Wide Web; HTTP;
Readings: Chapters 38,39 of White, Chapters 1-8, 26 of Gralla,  Chapter 26 (p 571-576) from Orfali et al.
Recommended: Chapter 10-11 of Gralla, A Brief history of the Internet by the pioneers, Internet timeline

Distributed Systems and the Internet
21 Tu Apr 4   Client/Server architectures; Distributed enterprise application platforms; CORBA; COM
Readings: Chapter 9 of Gralla, Chapters 2, 21, 22 (up to page 477) of Orfali et al.
Recommended: Chapters 3, 22 (from page 478 until the end), 25 of Orfali et al.
22 Th Apr 6 Internet application platforms; Java, Servlets, JSP; Web servers; Application servers
Readings: Chapter 26 (up to p. 563), Chapters 27, 28 (up to p. 621, only skim Jave details) of Orfali et al., Application Servers (up until "Life with an Application Server"), including user comments
Recommended: Chapter 29 of Orfali et al, and Chapter 13 of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing.

Modern Information Systems and the WWW
23 Tu Apr 11  Information on the WWW: HTML, XML and related technologies;
Readings: Chapters 22-24 of Gralla, Chapters 26 (pp 555-571), 28 (pp 623-633) of Orfali et al, Top 10 mistakes of web design, top 10 new mistakes of web design, XML and the Second Generation Web
24 Th Apr 13  Intranets, Extranets and Interoperability;
Readings: Chapters 42, 43 of Gralla, Chapter 11 (pp 229-236) of Orfali et al, 10 Errors of Web project management
25 Tu Apr 18 The technological threats to privacy  Invited Speaker: Jason Catlett, Chief Executive Junkbuster, Junkbusters.com
Readings: Why the future doesn't need us, by Bill Joy; Fair information Practices
26 Th Apr 20 Roundup: The promise of the Web and other stories
Readings: Design for the digital revolution, by Bill Joy

27 Tu Apr 25 Student Presentations I
28 Th Apr 27 Student Presentations II

     Fr Apr 28: Final course review

Tu May 9: Final Exam - in class

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This course  was designed and implemented in close collaboration with Prof. Foster Provost. We would like to thank Prof. Norm White (of Stern) and Prof. Chris Dellarocas (of MIT Sloan) for all their useful contributions to the course's content and style.