Active Server Pages Tutorial ASP 101 Part 00 Of 10: Introduction

To learn more about ASP visit http://599CD.com/XNEOPS

Hey guys. This is another one of those tutorials I recorded about TEN YEARS AGO, so the audio might be a little rough. Some of the terms might be a little out of date (Microsoft no longer makes FrontPage; you have to use Expression Web or a different editor now) but pretty much everything in this tutorial series is still perfectly valid today - and it's a GREAT place to start learning how to build ASP web pages. Enjoy.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is a technology to create dynamic Web pages - pages that change for each user. You can use ASP to create customized pages for your visitors, query databases, and even build entire e-commerce solutions.

Major topics covered in this class:

- Components of an ASP Script
- Basic ASP Commands
- If / Then / Else Statements
- HTML Tags in ASP Scripts
- Variables & Loops
- Performing Math in ASP
- Processing HTML Form Input
- Using the QueryString

We'll start off this course by talking about ASP - what Active Server Pages are, and how they work. We'll talk about terms, definitions, and other details about ASP. We'll talk about scripts and how they fit into Web pages. We'll discuss client-side v. server-side scripts.

Our first script starts out simple: we'll show you how to create a basic HTML page and insert some simple ASP commands into it. We'll start with just displaying the current date and time. This will let us show you the syntax of ASP scripting.

We'll learn about the Response.Write command, and how we can use it to display dynamic content on our pages. We'll learn about strings, and string concatenation. We'll see how functions work, and we'll use the DatePart function to display parts of a date (the month, year, etc.). We'll show you how conditional statements work with the IF/THEN command. We'll show you how to preview your ASP pages in your Web browser.

Next we'll see how we can include HTML tags inside of ASP scripts to format our text. You can use this technique to create dynamic colors, hyperlinks, and so on. We'll then learn about Loops. We'll show you how to declare variables to store data, and use those variables to control your loops.

We'll show you how to perform mathematical calculations in ASP - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. We'll also review the order of math operations. We'll go into more detail with the IF/THEN statement by adding the ELSE and ELSEIF clauses.

Next we'll learn something extremely useful by processing Form Data. We'll create an HTML form page to collect customer data. We'll show you how to strip out the unnecessary FrontPage code from your form HTML. We'll create an ASP page to receive that data and process it. This allows your Web sites to become interactive.

We'll teach you how to read the QueryString so that you can pass information to your ASP pages in the address bar of your browser, or hyperlinks. This will allow you to embed information in your pages that gets passed to ASP scripts when users click on them.

There is a lot of information covered in this class. It is the perfect basic class to give you the fundamentals of ASP programming. It's over 96 minutes long, and by the time you're done, you'll be creating your own ASP scripts and pages.