A lot of people have been asking me, "When are you going to have a tutorial about Visual Basic .NET 2005?" Good question! The "Complete Course" is a 23 lesson tutorial for VB.NET version 1.0 that uses the Microsoft Press book "Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Step By Step". The idea was to create an educational experience that would cost hundreds of dollars to get anywhere else. In line with that, I tried to copy a class room experience as closely as possible given the limitations of a web site and email lessons. A lot of people learned a lot from the Complete Course ... and so did I. First, I learned that you can't have an actual classroom experience. The essence of the classroom is people learning from each other as they all study the same topic at the same time. And that's precisely what you can't do online. The great advantage of online courses is that you can learn at any time and you can study anything that you wish. You have complete freedom to learn at your own pace and study only what you want. So in this new course, I'm giving up the goal of a pseudo classroom experience and going back to the strengths of online tutorials. Second, I learned that basing a course on an actual textbook is another thing that works for lecture halls but doesn't work as well online. Each lesson in the Complete Course extends and explains a chapter of the Microsoft Press book; it doesn't duplicate it. That's the way books are used in the courses I have taught and courses I have taken in actual class rooms. But that doesn't work as well online because most people just don't want to make the investment in a $50 book. So this new course will be completely self contained. It will be difficult to duplicate the thoroughness of an actual text book, but I'll do my best. One thing that has changed for the better (at least for the next year) is that it's now possible to make this course entirely free, not just low cost. The Complete Course was based on the Microsoft Press Step By Step book in part because you could get a fully legal VB.NET Standard Edition for just a little more than the cost of the book. It was the cheapest way I knew of to move up to VB.NET. Visual Basic .NET 2005 Express Edition has made that idea obsolete. For the next year (until November 6, 2006), Microsoft will allow you to download Visual Basic .NET Express Edition free of charge. You can use it forever. But getting a copy in the first place will not necessarily be free forever. Since Microsoft has a history of changing their corporate mind on things like this, we'll just have to see what they say next November to be sure. The really good news is that Visual Basic .NET 2005 Express Edition is an ideal learning tool for beginners. It's based on exactly the same Framework 2.0 that the (much, much) more expensive versions are and there is not that much missing. My advice is, get VB.NET 2005 Express and only buy a copy of the others when you absolutely have to.
JAVA
Java is a programming language originally developed by Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture History The Java language was created by James Gosling in June 1991 for use in one of his many set-top box projects.[4] The language was initially called Oak, after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office—and also went by the name Green—and ended up later being renamed to Java, from a list of random words.[5] Gosling's goals were to implement a virtual machine and a language that had a familiar C/C++ style of notation.[6] The first public implementation was Java 1.0 in 1995. It promised "Write Once, Run Anywhere" (WORA), providing no-cost runtimes on popular platforms. It was fairly secure and its security was configurable, allowing network and file access to be restricted. Major web browsers soon incorporated the ability to run secure Java applets within web pages. Java quickly became popular. With the advent of Java 2, new versions had multiple configurations built for different types of platforms. For example, J2EE was for enterprise applications and the greatly stripped down version J2ME was for mobile applications. J2SE was the designation for the Standard Edition. In 2006, for marketing purposes, new J2 versions were renamed Java EE, Java ME, and Java SE, respectively.
SOFTWARE TESTING
Software testing is the process of checking software, to verify that it satisfies its requirements and to detect errors.
Software testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test, with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate. This includes, but is not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs.
Testing can never completely establish the correctness of computer software. Instead, it furnishes a criticism or comparison that compares the state and behaviour of the product against a specification.
Over its existence, computer software has continued to grow in complexity and size. Every software product has a target audience. For example, the audience for video game software is completely different from banking software. Therefore, when an organization develops or otherwise invests in a software product, it presumably must assess whether the software product will be acceptable to its end users, its target audience, its purchasers, and other stakeholders. Software testing is the process of attempting to make this assessment.
DATABASE
A Database is a structured collection of data which is managed to meet the needs of a community of users. The structure is achieved by organizing the data according to a database model. The model in most common use today is the relational model. Other models such as the hierarchical model and the network model use a more explicit representation of relationships (see below for explanation of the various database models).
A computer database relies upon software to organize the storage of data. This software is known as a database management system (DBMS). Databases management systems are categorized according to the database model that they support. The model tends to determine the query languages that are available to access the database. A great deal of the internal engineering of a DBMS, however, is independent of the data model, and is concerned with managing factors such as performance, concurrency, integrity, and recovery from hardware failures. In these areas there are large differences between products.
Computer Graphics
The term computer graphics includes almost everything on computers that is not text or sound. Today almost every computer can do some graphics, and people have even come to expect to control their computer through icons and pictures rather than just by typing. The term Computer graphics has more meaning:
the representation and manipulation of pictorial data by a computer
the various technologies used to create and manipulate such pictorial data
the images so produced, and
a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content.
Today much of our life is affected by computers, and by computer graphics. Whether you see them on television, in newspapers, in weather reports or while at the doctor's surgery, computer images are all around you. A well-chosen graph is able to transform a complex table of numbers into meaningful results. Such graphs are used to illustrate papers, reports, and theses, as well as providing the basis for presentation material in the form of slides and overhead transparencies. A range of tools and facilities are available to enable users to visualise their data, and computer graphics are used in many disciplines.
