Philip Greenspun

After completing this self-contained course on server-based Internet applications software, students who start with only the knowledge of how to write and debug a computer program will have learned how to build web-based applications on the scale of Amazon.com. Unlike the desktop applications that most students have already learned to build, server-based applications have multiple simultaneous users. This fact, coupled with the unreliability of networks, gives rise to the problems of concurrency and transactions, which students learn to manage by using the relational database system.