Chris Bates — Faculty of Arts Computing Engineering and Sciences
Welcome to my little lay-by on the Information Superhighway. I'm a Senior
Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in
the the UK. I teach in the Faculty
of Arts Computing Engineering and Sciences. My teaching is currently focussed
on enterprise scale computing using Java or .Net and Web Services. I do quite
a lot of work around design patterns.
I'm interested in programming, the teaching of programming and programming as a
craft rather than an engineering endeavour. I give lectures on
Extreme Programming and other Agile approaches
and have done some evaluation of agile teams.
I recently started a PhD at
the Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute in which I'm
examining how programmers communicate - what they say to each other in technical
discussions, how they say those things and what they are trying to achieve.
For a few years my research interests were in the area of systems performance.
I was particularly involved in the performance analysis of large database systems. I'm currently writing a piece of software which will create large artificial datasets that can be loaded
into a database where data suitable for experimentation does not exist.
I'm using Python as my development
language. Python is a fantastic language: it's simple yet expressive and
comes with a fantastic suite of libraries and modules. I used to develop
in either Perl or Java but increasingly I found that Python meets all for my requirements. If you're a developer, give it a try.
This Website has sections for each of my books. The book sections contain errata, code samples and links to useful resources. If you are here by accident or because you followed a link from a search engine, please feel free to look around.
|
When first written, this book filled a yawning gap in the market. It's an undergraduate text which ranges from introductory HTML through stylesheets and dynamic HTML, and on to server-side programming. Most of the server programming is shown in Perl which is an extraordinarily powerful language, but the book does touch on ASP, PHP and Java.
I don't want to sound too much like the publisher's marketing department but this book has been well-received by students, lecturers and reviewers. The second edition added lots of new material and continues to sell as well as the first did.
|
 |
|
The third edition of this book was published in 2006. It has more
PHP, more JavaScript and more XML content than the previous editions.
|
 |
XML in Theory and Practice
Another gap filler. Many, many books have been published on XML and related technologies, but most of them are aimed at the "professional" market. That is, they are written for people who are already working in IT and need to learn a new technology. The usual assumption is that these readers do not need lots of background material or helpful exercises. Instead they want detailed information — and lots of it.
Well students aren't like that. By their very nature students are starting to learn about technology. Students usually need to know only a little bit about the technologies that they are using. Context and reason are at least as important as descriptions of libraries. This book introduces readers to a range of XML-related technologies and shows them in action through two large, comprehensive examples. XML in Theory and Practice makes an ideal supporting text text for introductory XML courses based on the use of Java to manipulate the XML data.
|
 |
Page last modified 16th August, 2008.