MDIA 3294—Web Scripting 2

Difficulty: medium/hard

This course is a continuation from Web Scripting 1. In Web Scripting 1, you primarily learned how to use JavaScript in front-end development. In this course, you focus more on back-end technologies. You learn PHP and MySQL, which really steps up your development game. You’ll still have to definitely know and understand JavaScript from the previous course to even begin to understand this — though.

The course consists of having to do coding tutorials at home after class each week (only for the first 6 weeks), which introduces you to new concepts so you have a bit of an understanding of whats coming up in the class the next week. These were pretty easy, they were only about 30 minutes long and you just have to follow exactly what the instructor was doing in the video. I also think they were quite helpful. Aside from tutorials — be prepared for two three hour long “hackathons” (sounds fun…doesn't it!). They’re exams. You are given a review package before the exam that has a similar format, so it’s not much of a surprise. During the exam, you’re given a .pdf that states what you need to do and how the application you’re building should work. You also get a short video of the instructor demonstrating how it would work as well, so you can compare your work to the video during the exam. These exams are not easy, and do not expect to finish them. They’re split into levels, so if you make it to level 4 out of 5, for example, you would probably get 80%. Do not expect to finish the exam. Try to get to a passing level at least and call it a day if you’re getting too beaten up because of it. I felt pretty brain-dead after these hackathons I’m not going to lie. Also, besides the hackathons and tutorials, you have a huge final project to do as well. The final project for us was to basically recreate a reddit type application. You’d have to come up with a theme (subreddit, essentially) and ensure your users could log in, log out, post to the subreddit, edit their post, edit their profile etc. This project is really hard. I didn’t get close to finishing it. Just do the best you can with it and ask for help from your instructor and your peers, you probably wont get as bad of a mark as you think you will if you tried.

I personally found PHP and MySQL easier to understand than JavaScript — but it was by no means easy. I think this instructors teaching style and tutorials you had to do after class helped a lot in helping me understand the concepts. Some people have the brains for this kind of stuff, a lot of people do not. This course was even a challenge for most of our front-end developers in the class, let alone the design-oriented brains. Just remember all you have to do is pass this course. You will be fine.

Full course description here