Most course materials that I will provide are either .html files viewed directly in a browser, or .zip file files which should be downloaded onto your desktop. Clicking an html link causes its page to be displayed in your browser.

Clicking a download link causes its contents to be saved onto your computer.

• If you right click a download link, select Save target as ... (Microsoft IE) or Save link as ... (Netscape) from the context menu.
• If you left click a download link, you will see a pop-up box that allows you to open the file or save it to the (hard) disk of your computer; select saving. In fact, it may even popup an Unknown file type window, in which case you should again select the saving option.

The easiest place to save the file is on the desktop. If desktop is not in the Save In: box, click the yellow folder icon to its right (the one with the up-pointing arrow) repeatedly until desktop appears. Then click Save. If you did not want to download that file, click Cancel at any time. On Windows cluster machines, the only other place you can download files is in the folder c:\temp.

When you click on a download link, Windows might automatically download the application to a special location from where you will have to retrieve it. Also, sometimes Windows will ask you whether you want to install/open up the application immediately: if prompted, you probably do NOT want to open the application. I cannot predict which of these windows will popup on your machine, but once you learn the sequence, browser downloading will be simple and natural.

Unzipping Files

To unzip all the files in a zip file, for example, F.zip

• Right click the zip file that you want to unzip.
• In its context menu, select the Extract to folder C:\...F option (note that the name of the zip file, in this example, F, always appears at the end of the selection).
When finished you should see a new folder on your desktop (or wherever the folder you unzipped came from) with the same names as the zip file (the zip file will still be there too; so  in this case, the folder is named F).

WinZip (the zipping/unzippng software) is already installed on all Windows computers in the cluster. If you want to install it on your own computer, you can use the  link WinZip to download a copy.

Daily Exercises, programming projects, and on-line exams must be turned in as single zip file that contains all the files inside a project folder. To zip all the files in a folder named F, for example, into a single zip file

Right click the folder that you want to zip.

In its context menu, select the Add to F.zip option (note that the name of the folder, in this example F, always precedes the zip extension; do not use the more generic Add to Zip operation).

A WinZip window will automatically appear and disappear from your screen (this might happen so fast that you do not see it). When finished you should see a new file on your desktop (or wherever the folder you zipped came from) with the same names as your folder (the folder will still be there too) and the zip file extension (so in this case, the zip file is named F.zip).