Stanford Web Applications course lectures

You can now watch the fall 2010 Stanford Web Applications course containing 104 recorded lectures. The course contents are:

1. INTRODUCTION
2. HTML and CSS
3. URLs and Links
4. The Ruby Language
5. Rails Introduction
6. Introduction to SQL
7. Active Record
8. HTTP and HTTPS
9. Cookies and Sessions
10. Forms
11. Javascript
12. The Document Object Model (DOM)
13. Events
14. AJAX
15. Security: Network Attacks
16. Security: Session Attacks
17. Security: Isolation
18. Security: Code Injection
19. Security: Phishing Attacks
20. Large-Scale Applications
21. Datacenters
22. Deploying Web Applications
23. Course Wrap-Up

The importance of knowing Unicode

Here are some resources about Unicode, handling special characters and the importance to care for data encoding when writing code:

First there’s Joel Spolsky’s classical article about Unicode and Character sets: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). Read it to get a feeling for the importance of knowing how data is encoded.

Then there’s this great comment by Tom Christiansen to a Stack Overflow question about using UTF-8 in Perl.

A large part is Perl specific and if you want an in in-depth analysis about things you have to consider while writing Perl code go ahead an read it.
But it includes a part, called Assume Brokenness, that lists a large number of points of interest that apply to almost every programming language.

The writer of the comment also has a presentation about Unicode support and pitfalls in several programming languages: Unicode Support Shootout – The Good, the Bad, & the (mostly) Ugly (HTML presentation / PDF).