Many Web sites you visit are simply a collection of HTML pages. You type in a URL or navigate the site, and a page displays in your browser. Other Web sites that you visit are interactive, with pages that display text, graphics, and values that change and update themselves as you enter information, make selections, or navigate the site.
There are several ways to put interactivity into a Web site. One way, used by many commercial sites, is to incorporate Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP) technology and components. In this course, we will introduce you to the structure, syntax, and some common uses of Active Server Pages.
This course begins by describing how ASP scripts function within HTML pages and presents "building blocks" that give those ASP scripts the functionality to perform calculations, store data, make branching and looping decisions, and display results inside the HTML code. Then, you will learn about creating, and retrieving user and system information within a Web site. Next, you will learn ways of maintaining information for multiple users and processes as those users move through your Web site. Finally, the course will present techniques for joining a database of user and product information to your Web site through ASP commands.
Along the way, you'll work on a course project that will give you a chance to use this information and technique in the context of a typical Web application. As you learn new skills in each module, you'll apply those to the next phase of your project, an online catalog for selling T-shirts. When you're done, you will have used features of ASP to build a Web-based application.