SQL

Creating a database is considered one of the best aspects in this course. As a beginner, it was very difficult to understand and accomplish all materials in unit 9 and 10. However, I repeated reading all articles of those units above, and I began understanding the concept of SQL (Structured Query Language). I believe that learning how to create database and understanding SQL are very important and useful. However, few weeks are not enough to get them. For assignment 10, everything went well, and I did not have any problems except syntax. I found many problems for typo especially with (S) singular and plural. Overall, I enjoy learning SQL, and I will spend more time reading and practice it after finishing this course.

Database

The concept of database is facilitating to a search mission. In the beginning, the most difficulties were to create the tables or entities and their attributes. No repeating elements or groups of elements, no partial dependencies on a concatenated key, and no dependencies on non-key attributes were the most important keys to create the tables or entities and their relationships. After reading the articles such as “The 3 Normal Forms: A Tutorial” by Fred Coulson and watching some tutorials such as "Data Modeling" by Joshus Mostafa are the best way to get everything clear.

Technology Plan

This past week we had to do many readings. They were very useful and helpful. However, the three readings I liked the best and considered the top were the following: First, the lecture “Recipe for Failure”, although it is very short, it presents a good clarification of Technology Plans. It also gives me a wonderful thought of the rest of the readings that I will read further. Second, one of the most important readings is “what went wrong? Unsuccessful information technology projects” by Brenda Whittaker. It is an amazing study because it presents an illustration of the strength and weakness of information of technology projects. Third, “Study Shows New Funding Sources…” by John Bertot and others demonstrates many programs that help public libraries to develop their services such as LSTA, E-rate, and Gates foundations. Finally, one of the greatest readings that I read this week was “Managing Technology” by Robert Dugan. Robert presents a great vision of information technology plans, and how they will affect the higher education in the United States.

The world of XML

Last week I learned HTML, and it was interesting to me. This week the task is learning XML. In the beginning, XML is eXtensible Markup Language; “It is a textual data format, with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although XML's design focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures”. (Wikipedia)
I read an introduction in XML in W3school web site. It is very useful and easy to understand, then I did some practice into it. After I got the concept about XML, I watched a tutorial in YouTube called “just enough XML to survive”. Although the speaker was talking very fast, I got a lot of information that helped me expanding my knowledge about XML. Finally, the introduction to XML that is been in cover pages is very useful because it has an easy style of explanation the idea.