CIW courses and certifications

Overview

I completed these courses through the UWS IT Academy as a distance learner with a weekly "virtual classroom" with an online tutor setting exercises and answering questions through a group chat interface.

CIW supply an abundance of material in the form of books & code for the labs and provide a pretty good online service with assessment, review and practice tests, further support files and training movies.

All the courses assume some previous programming experience with other languages and are comprehensive in their scope while managing to get into some detail as you progress.

For those who are unfamiliar with the CIW program or these specific courses this page provides a summary of the "Skills Taught" copied from the relevant CIW site pages.

As a side note, I used Expression Web 4 for the JavaScript labs and exercises and ActiveState's Komodo 7 for PERL, Komodo being a much more Visual Studio-like IDE for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript & PERL developers.

CIW JavaScripts Specialist Certificate

JavaScript Specialist

  • JavaScript language essentials, including program flow control, form validation, image animation, frame targeting and cookie creation.
  • JavaScript code development, including writing programs and writing script for the JavaScript object model.
  • Web site implementation, including authoring and scripting, Web content creation, Web management and digital media tools.
CIW Web Design Specialist Certificate

Web Design Specialist

  • Web site development essentials, including the site development process, customer expectations, and ethical and legal issues in Web development.
  • Web design elements, including aesthetics, the site user's experience, navigation, usability and accessibility.
  • Basic Web technologies, including Hypertext Markup Language [HTML], Extensible HTML [XHTML] and extended technologies, image files, GUI site development applications, and site publishing and maintenance.
  • Advanced Web technologies, including multimedia and plug-in technologies, client-side and server-side technologies, and Web databases.
  • Popular production tools, including Microsoft Expression Web, and Adobe Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash.
  • Design and development technologies, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript, Java applets and Dynamic HTML.
  • Current issues in Web design, including the extensibility of design tools, compatibility of these tools, open-source applications and the functionality of current Web browsers.
CIW PERL Specialist Certificate

PERL Specialist

  • Perl language essentials, including syntax, regular expressions and data types.
  • Perl code development, including accessing and manipulating files.
  • Web site implementation, including database connectivity and debugging techniques.