I mostly communicate on a personal level, so it's better we acquaint ourselves in beginning. My name is Amrit Hallan and I'm a web developer. I work through my web site - http://www.bytesworth.com. I'm not a nerd (and don't want to be) and most of my knowledge has come to me piecemeal through lots of hard work and interaction with my other developer friends. I don' t think it'd be fair to say that I'm an authority on ASP but yes, I have a few satisfied clients in my portfolio and I know enough to get you started. By time you are through with these daily chapters, you'll have learnt enough to make a small shopping cart in ASP.

Most of chapters will be organized in a linear fashion, so that you always have to work according to your previously acquired knowledge. Sometimes I'll sound like writing entire chapter in a bulleted form, but that'll be just to keep unnecessary (I mean that is out of scope of this reference) stuff out.

I wish I could know your name too. But I don't know how many people are going to read this. If you want to let me know that YOU are one at moment reading this, you are welcome to send me a friendly message at mailto:amrit@bytesworth.com. I love to hear from people (ok, word "people" excludes Spammers - they are not people).

Enough of my warming up. Here we go with first chapter.

Installing Personal Web Server

==> Beginning of Chapter One <==

If you want to work with ASP (Active Server Pages) on your personal computer, you need to install Personal Web Server (PWS). As name indicates, it's a server. Unlike normal HTML pages, dynamic pages (either created with CGI, PHP, ASP or Cold Fusion) require some sort of a server to carry on their business. Without a server, you can create a dynamic page, but you cannot view it decently in run-time mode.

Since I mostly work with Active Server Pages using PWS, I'll tell you how to install PWS.

It ships free with Win98 CD, and should be in add-ons folder.

>From there, install PWS on your computer. The installation program creates a folder, inetpub in directly you specify during installation. This inetpub, further has a folder, wwwroot. So if you install your PWS on your C drive, wwwroot path should be

C:INETPUBWWWROOT

First thing first: HTML tags and ASP scripts don't socialize well, and although it is not a politically correct agenda, you have to segregate them. Whenever you are writing VBScript code for ASP, enclose code within <% %>.

So if you want to initialize a VBScript variable, do it like this:

<% Dim name name = "Tutan Khamen" %>

For instance, if you want to use variable "name" in your HTML (ASP, actually) page, all you have to do is:

<%@Language=VBScript%> <% Option Explicit %>