In the last two weeks, three friends have approached me asking how they

can get into Web development: a university professor who wants to create a

virtual community for his students, an owner of a language school who

wants to get into e-commerce, and an English teacher looking for a

lucrative career move. My advice to all of them was the same: learn HTML,

ASP and database connectivity.

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HTML is the core of the Web

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From the simplest Web site to the most complex e-commerce solution, HTML

is the script that is ultimately sent down to the visitors’ browsers.

There is no getting around it: if you want to do Web development, you need

to know HTML. The good thing is that HTML is relatively easy to learn. It

is not a programming language so there are no for-next loops, no

variables, and nothing about sessions or functions to learn. It is just a

mark-up script, which means that you merely surround text with tags which

tell the browser to treat that text specially. To see how easy it is, take

my Learn HTML in One Hour workshop

of the hour you will have created your first Web site and learned the most

important HTML tags. It’s really that easy.

After you have made your first home page come up in a browser, learn more

by getting an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage 2000 which

allows you to create pages in a Word-like environment and then look at the

automatically generated HTML text. Such an editor is one of the best HTML

learning tools that there is - if you want to learn how to create a

colored table, then create one and look at the HTML code. To learn more,

change the code a bit and look at the table again. Keep doing this until

you get an understanding of how the HTML code affects the display in the

browser. HTML is simple enough that experimenting in this way will

speed-teach most of practical HTML skills you need.

After you get a sense of the relationship between HTML tags and their

output in the browser, get a good-sized, comprehensive book on HTML 4.0

and work through it at quick pace. It’s not important you understand each

tag in depth, but it is important that you have an overview of all the

HTML tags so that you can spot them in the code and know what is available

to you when you are designing pages. After you have worked through a book

like this, you will have a good theoretical basis of HTML, which is

important when you start programming in ASP.

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ASP is a powerful server-side script

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Only knowing HTML is limiting because all you can do is create static

pages. What if you have a list of students, for example, which you want to

sometimes display sorted by last name, sometimes sorted by grade, and

sometimes want to show only those who have finished a specific assignment?

For this you need to have this information in a database and use ASP to

dynamically send only the information you want to your visitors’ browsers.

To develop sites with ASP, you first need to set up the ASP programming

environment on your computer, which can be difficult if you have never

done it before. The easiest way to do this is to take my workshop

Installing PWS, ASP and Access on Windows 98

enable you to get an ASP developing environment up within the hour,

complete with a working ASP page which reads data from an Access database.

Next you need to learn ASP. For most non-programmers this is going to

involve a learning curve. Also, if you have never programmed in a

client/server environment, you will go through a paradigm shift trying to

understand the five server objects: application, server, session, response

and request. The good thing is that you don't have to understand

everything about ASP to start making useful ASP applications. My advice is

to get a good book on ASP and work through it at your own pace pulling out

of it only that which you can use for your own particular Web application

project, then keep the book within arm's reach for reference.

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Database connectivity: where the rubber hits the road

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ASP applications without database connectivity are not much more useful

than plain HTML pages. Hence, you will want to learn database connectivity

from the very beginning of your ASP learning. Spend your time learning how

to read, write, delete and edit data in databases from your ASP pages.

This is where the real power of an ASP application lies.

Although ASP can talk to almost any database, Microsoft Access 2000 is the

best database to use with ASP, and you will need to have a copy installed

on your machine before you begin programming database connectivity into

ASP. Access 97 will work, too, of course. Many times if you have Microsoft

Office on your computer, you already will have a copy of Microsoft Access

installed, so be sure to check before you buy Access 2000.

Today, you can get excellent books on database connectivity using ASP, and

Web sites such as www.asptoday.com and www.aspfree.com have hundreds of

code samples for you to try out and learn from.

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Hosting your ASP Web site

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When it is time to put your ASP Web site on the Internet for others to

database-generated ASP Web site for free.

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Not easy, but possible and very powerful

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In summary, learning ASP and database connectivity is not as easy as

learning how to use Microsoft Word or other Windows applications.

Programming involves another level of involvement and learning which for

some is simply not a joy. However, if you are excited about learning basic

programming skills and can invest a couple of months learning and

experimenting with this technology, you will come out with skills with

which you can create robust and useful database-generated Web applications

such as virtual classrooms or e-commerce Web sites. You will also be able

to market yourself as a highly paid Web developer. More power to you!

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Edward Tanguay is a Web developer and language trainer based in Berlin.

For more diaries and tips on development visit Edward's Web Developer Site