Course Description

ASP is a Microsoft technology that has been around for many years powering many internal and external web sites. This class will teach you the basics of creating web applications using the Microsoft web technology Active Server Pages (ASP) and the scripting language VBScript. Both of these work together so you can interact with you web user to do all sorts of cool things such as transferring HTML form information, create content based upon user input, track what your user does from page to page, and have the ability to store important information on a more permanent basis such as data files or databases. Relying on plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript ties you to just giving your user plain old static web pages that never change unless you manually update them. With ASP you open your web users to a whole new way in giving them information that they need when they want it without constantly uploading new content. Making your life easier in the process. We will begin with the basics of helping the novice understand the differences between static (HTML and CSS) and dynamic web development; the steps of how a web server renders a web page in the browser, the basics of a programming language (VBScript), and how you can intercept a request from the user and make it dynamic. This is a self-paced, online course. You have 6 weeks to finish. LVS is a Corel Training Partner. LVS students may purchase Corel products at a significant savings. Follow this link for details. LVS students are also eligible take advantage of special offers made available by famous software developers such as Andromeda, AV Bros, Extensis, Harry Heim, namesuppressed, Nik Multimedia, and Ulead. Details are provided in the classinfo link found in the confirmation of registration. If you would like to receive more information regarding this course, click on the "Contact Us" link in the Information section and we'll try to answer any of your questions within the day.

Course Requirements

What do I need to Run ASP? Text editor. Any text editor is fine. I would try to avoid using WYSIWYG web editors like a Dreamweaver or FrontPage just because I want you to focus on the ASP code itself and have nothing else distracting you. Also, some web editors may modify your code if they do not know what it is. So to be safe a simple text editor is the best. Web server. Since ASP is a Microsoft technology, you will need a Microsoft Web server. To test your pages locally (not required for this class) you would need either Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional. The web server used with these two versions of Windows is called Internet Information Server (IIS). Setting up IIS is not too difficult, but I will not show you how to in this class. Since this is not a requirement for the class and is past the beginner level, I will give you two links that show you how to setup IIS on a Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP machine Windows 2000 Pro: www.webwizguide.com/asp/tutorials/installing_iis_win2k.asp Windows XP Pro: www.webwizguide.com/asp/tutorials/installing_iis_winXP_pro.asp For this course we will be using a free web host (Brinkster) to develop and deploy our ASP web pages. Brinkster is one of the few web hosts that give away free web site packages that support ASP. Most of the free web hosts out there are on Linux web servers (Apache) that do not support ASP pages (usually they support PHP). Instructions with screen captures will be provided in the week 1 lesson. A working knowledge of your computer is essential: Free Windows Class Here Plan to devote approximately 3 - 4 hrs per week on the lesson and assignment.

Course Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is that you are familiar with the basics of web design with HTML including forms. LVS offers classes in X/HTML: Build Your Website series of classes.

Course Syllabus

Lesson 1 Setting up your ASP enviroment Lesson 2 How Server-side Scripting Works Lesson 3 VBScript Overview (Basic Syntax, Variables, Data Types and Control Statements) Lesson 4 Basic ASP Components (Response, Request and Server) Lesson 5 More VBScript (Arrays, Loops and Procedures) Lesson 6 Sessions and Cookies

Course Excerpt

LESSON 1 Overview Active Server Pages (ASP) is a technology to develop dynamic web pages. I call it a "technology" because it really is a combination of a couple things. First it is a scripting engine which runs on a web server, second it is a set of commands that do different things and third it is a scripting language. For this class you will get a basic understanding of how to create dynamic web pages using the Microsoft technology ASP, learn how to create basic program scripts and learn how web pages can make web site a lot more interesting. Before I get into anything technical at all, let's discuss what a dynamic web page is and how it differs from a regular static one. Note: There are many different types of technologies that create dynamic web pages (PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Coldfusion, etc.), but no matter what you use they all do the same thing when it comes to making your website(s) more robust in giving your web site users a more enjoyable web experience. If you surf around the internet today, you'll see that there are lots of static web pages out there. What do I mean by a static web page? Essentially, it is a page whose content consists of some HTML that was typed directly in a text or web editor and saved as an .html or .htm file. The author of the page has already completely determined the exact content of the page, in HTML, at some time before any user visits the page. Note: I will not discuss how JavaScript can make your page "dynamic" since the content still has to be written on the page first. Static Pages vs. Dynamic Pages Static Web Pages Here are the basic steps at how a static web page finds its way into a client (user) web browser: Author writes a page composed of HTML and saves it with and .html or .htm extension and then uploads the web page to a web server somewhere on the internet. A user requests the page by typing the address in their web browser and the request is passed from the browser through the internet to the web server. The web server locates the .html or .htm page. The web server sends a HTML data stream (bits and bytes) back across the internet to the web browser. The web browser parses (reads and interprets) the HTML and displays the page. Limitations of Static Web Pages Basically, everything on each web page you create will have to be "hand-coded" by you and will look the same for every user no matter where they are or what they want to see from your web page. If for example, you wanted to show people new information based upon what time of day it was or wanted you be able to have people send you information in a form or have your page link to a list of products you want to sell you basically are out of luck. Static web pages are great for web sites that will never change during the lifetime they are online or if you do not mind constantly updating your site by editing you web page(s) and uploading them back on the internet. But there has to be a better way, right? Note: The term web server refers to the software that manages the web pages and makes them available to the 'client' computers - via a local network or via the internet. In the case of the internet, the web server and browser are usually on two different machines many, many miles apart. I will briefly review how to setup a local web server on your own PC, but for this class I will show you exactly how to use a free web host where you will post all your assignments and you work files as you learn. Dynamic Web Pages We need a way to replace some of that "hard-coded" HTML source with a set of instructions, which will be used to generate HTML for the page at the time the user requests the page. In other words the page is generated dynamically on request. Here are the basic steps at how a dynamic web page finds its way into a web browser: Author writes a page composed of HTML and saves it (not .html or .htm) and then uploads the web page to a web server somewhere on the internet. A user requests the page by typing the address in their web browser and the request is passed from the browser to the web server. The web server locates the file of instructions. The web server follows the instructions in order to create a data stream of HTML The web server sends the newly created HTML stream back across the network to the web browser. The web browser processes the HTML and displays the page. The process of serving a dynamic web page is only slightly different (steps 3 and 4) from the process of serving a static web page. There is just one extra step involved (step 4). But the difference is crucial -- the HTML that defines the web page is not generated until after the web page has been requested. For example, we can use this technique to write a set of instructions for creating a page that displays the current time: Continued... Please note: Lessons provide step-by-step instructions with detailed screen captures.

Course Goals

At the end of this course you will know how dynamic web pages work, using VBScript to learn programming basics and create some simple web applications.

Course Reviews

Anita: [Liked best:]"Easy to understand (as easy as this stuff can get anyway!)" More...