Unfortunately I have had to drop out of this course mid-way through due to personal circumstances. I hope I've been able to put at least some information of use here.

For more information about Java, see my notes on the new course M254 Java Everywhere, coming in 2005.

Course Preparation.

This course uses Java as the language of choice to demonstrate the Web technologies used in the course, but it is not a Java programming course. It is assumed one has a basic knowledge of Java before starting. As I have no Java knowledge, I've been advised to learn the basics of Java before the course begins, so I've purchased the following book:

Java: How to Program by Deitel & Deitel, 5th Ed. 2003. (International Edition) ISBN: 0131202367.

Also recommended is:
Beginning Java 2: SDK 1.4 Edition. by Ivor Horton, 2003. ISBN: 0764543652

These books are pretty expensive, so you may prefer to use some online Java tutorials if your Java is rusty. For example:  The Java Tutorial

There's a public area on the official M360 site at:

M360 Public Info

This contains a good deal of information about the course, and can be accessed by non-M360 students who are curious about what the course entails.

The course mailing (received in mid-January) contains all the course material you will need for the whole year, complete with two binders provided. The TMAs (four in all) and Specimen Exam plus solutions are already available on the course website. Many of the TMA questions are in essay format, requiring essays of around 600 to 800 words. The final TMA contains a 2000 word essay. Reading outside the course is essential to gain a good mark; just regurgitating course material is insufficient. This is a Level 3 course, after all! Some Java coding is required, but we are assured this will be no more than 15 to 20 lines of code. Glancing through the (3 hour) exam paper shows it to be in short answer and essay format, although some Java code sections will be required to fully answer the questions.

There are tutor conferences for each region, and a general conference area for all students. These are not OUSA conferences, and are limited to current students only.

Course Book Chapters

• Introduction to E-commerce and Distributed Applications.
• The Internet and TCP/IP.
• Clients and Servers.
• Distributed Paradigms.
• Database Servers.
• Web Servers and the World Wide Web.
• Programming Web Servers.
• XML.
• RMI and Distributed Objects.
• CORBA.
• Internet Security.
• Concurrency.
• Transactions.
• Designing Distributed Systems.
• Bots, Agents and Spiders.
• Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing.