Become a Programmer
If you already know your discipline and industry, you have a head start on being a successful applying I.T. in that industry. This course is designed to "top up" the skills you already have; giving you expanded skills you can offer employers or clients; and new ways of applying the knowledge you already have in an industry you already know.
Add programming to your existing skills, to broaden business opportunities or attactiveness to employers.
- You don't need to commit to a degree to be an I.T. Professional
- Many IT professionals are in fact not qualified at all
- Success in IT comes by having up to date, usable skills; good networking (contacts with industry) and being commercially sensitive.
What is a Specialist Award?
- a type of “specialist” certificate;
- a way of topping up an existing degree or diploma with professional training that gives your employablilty a quantum leap forward;
- designed to provide a qualification to reflect “knowledge or skills” in a specialised area
Modules
Note that each module in the Specialist Award In Computer Programming is a short course in its own right, and may be studied separately.
HTML is the usual starting point for anyone to learn programming.
It is a relatively easy to learn programming language that is fundamental to a lot of programming on the internet. If you want to be able to program, or even just do basic editing, on web sites; this is a good language to begin with.
Programming is not a job that suits everyone; but it is a job that is valuable in many different workplaces.
Here is an extract from our html course. If you understand this, you are probably capable of learning html.
THE STRUCTURE OF AN HTML PAGE
All HTML pages must start with <html> and end with </html>. There is one exception being the <!doctype> tag which is discussed in Lesson 7. For now, you will not be using this tag, so all your HTML pages should start and finish with <html> tags. Additionally, they must contain a head section, e.g. <head> … </head> followed by a body section, e.g. <body> … </body>
Review your first HTML page and notice that some of the tags and text were indented slightly. This is done to help make your code more readable both to yourself and others who may need to change or update your pages in future.
The layout of your tags is not important to the browser, but is important to you as the author, especially as your pages become more detailed and complicated. The indenting should reflect the logical structure of the page. For example, tags contained within other tags should be indented, just as the <title> tags are indented from the <head> tags in your first HTML page. Likewise, the <p> tags are indented from the <body> tags. An obvious exception is the indenting of all tags within the <html> tags. To do this would result in excessively indented pages.
The process of indenting tags is called nesting, and is an important skill to master. While indenting is not important to browsers, correct nesting is. This means that tags should be closed in the reverse order to which they were opened. An HTML page that is correctly nested is referred to as well formed; this is discussed in more detail in Lesson 7.
Structure of Tags
Tags are not case sensitive; <em> means the same as <EM>. However, lower case is the standard that has been adopted for future versions of HTML (called XHTML).
Remember that end tags use the same keyword as start tags but include a forward slash before the keyword.
Tag Attributes
Some tags may have attributes, which select a variable specific for that tag, for example:
<table border=”1”>
Here border=”1” is the attribute of the <table> tag and in this case the browser will create a table with a border one pixel wide. The attribute should be immediately followed with an equals sign (i.e. =), and then the value of the attribute should be typed within double quote marks. Again, the browser will accept either single or double quotes, but double quotes are the standard for later versions of HTML.
Tags can have none, one or more attributes. Here are some other examples of tags and attributes:
<p align=”left”> Align the text in this paragraph to the left.
<td valign=”top” width=”50%”> Make a table cell 50 percent as wide as the table width and align its contents to the top of the cell; valign is the attribute to set vertical alignment.
<font color=”#999999”> Set the text to a colour specified as a HEX value.
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