FREE Ebook - Basic ASP Programming

In the early days of the web, creating a webpage was pretty straight forward. You formated the webpage using HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Every time you accessed the webpage, it looked exactly the same. Webpages were "static".

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts were used to pass data from web forms to the web server. CGI scripts were usually written in Perl. Perl is a language that is about as easy to understand as differential calculus.

Later advances brought Java Script, DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This allowed webmasters to create some pretty amazing applications. With these new technologies web pages became "dynamic". But these are all client side technologies. The applications could use only data that was on the webpage or was entered the web browser by the user.

ASP (Active Server Pages) is a server side technology that allows you to share data between the web server and the user, and to create dynamic webpages without worrying about the capabilities of the user's browser. With ASP, technically you don't need any "webpages" on your server. You need only data and the ASP code to build webpages on the fly.

Today ASP competes with PHP (Personal Home Page), an open source scripting language that looks a lot like Perl. ASP can be written in Java Script, but is usually written in VBScript (Visual Basic Script). "Visual" refers to Microsoft's visual development environment where you create applications by dragging and dropping visual elements into place. Basic is a very easy to learn programming language.

This ebook gives you a basic introduction to ASP and provides you with example code to do most of the things you might want to do to create a modern dynamic Web site.

 Creating Webpages With ASP
 Retrieving Form Data With ASP
 The ASP Application Object
 The ASP Session Object
 Working With Drives in ASP
 Working With Folders in ASP
 Working With Files in ASP
 Sending Email With ASP
 Handling ASP Errors