About this web site
by Francis Glassborow
Very early on during the writing of 'You Can Do It!' I had decided that support via the World Wide Web was going to be an important element. I wanted to create a virtual classroom in which students could ask questions share insight and generally become part of a community of people learning to program.
When I had finally delivered the text to the publishers I had to spend time on the CD for the book. Then I had to deal with issues raised by the copy editor, Shena Deuchars, (who did an excellent job including spotting a couple of errors in my source code). Then I had to deal with the page proofs. They were a disaster because those responsible had somehow managed to change settings on their software which resulted in the typesetting software modifying source code. Finally I had a few weeks to think about the web site.
Then other stuff happened including my elderly mother dying — a relief to all who loved her because the quality of her life over the final months was very bad, but the timing was unfortunate.
Roberta came to my rescue by doing all the design and most of the implementation. To do this she had to spend time finding out enough to do a good job. She is not the kind of person who is easily satisfied.
The following few weeks were ones of constant frustration as she discovered just what a mess can be made by even relatively recent browsers. Actually, these browsers are the analogues of compilers in programming and each has its own collection of bugs and idiosyncrasies.
Finally at the end of November she delivered effectively what you see here. Since then I have added a little polish as a result of comments and help from colleagues so that the site is more robust and likely to produce something that is at least readable even with fairly old or badly bugged browsers.
Early on Roberta had discovered the W3C website both as a valuable source of information and as a place where she could validate her XHTML files and Cascading Style Sheets. More recently I found an excellent validator from AI Internet Solutions. They have a very good free product and an even better one for sale. I will buy the latter when they bother to tell me how to buy the Standard version rather than the full Professional one (which provides facilities for which I have no need.)
Thank you Roberta, I could not have done this without you.