[Malvern] HTML and other Web stuff

[Ian Pascoe]

Hi Darren

SQL writing is not a problem, already crash coursed that one.

The time imperative is only of my own making, but I'd like to start to get
to grips  with things sooner rather than later.

The servers will serve .htm and .asp happily, so although I see the
advantages to learning HTML  from the ground up, I think I'm going to jump
in straight at the walking stage and use my VS .NET knowledge.

Following on from Guy's suggestion about Front Page etc, the guys at work
who deal with wevvy stuff say that unusually (!) Front Page inparticular,
inserts loads of, ahem, crap into the pages.

So, watch out, there may be yet another OK-ish web developer around soon!

TTFN

Ian

-----Original Message-----
From: malvern-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:malvern-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk]On Behalf Of Darren Beale
Sent: 05 May 2008 21:57
To: Malvern LUG
Subject: Re: [Malvern] HTML and other Web stuff


Hi Ian,

>  I need to start learning about constructing web pages with links into SQL
>  servers behind the page.
>
>  Can anyone recommend any good on line teaching resources to give me the
>  basics?

How long have you got? Is there a commerical imperative for you to get
up to speed quickly or do you have some time to find your feet first?

If it's the latter then I'd suggest that you do not go the
frontpage/dreamweaver route (at least just yet) and instead start
putting together pages (and ultimitely a simple database driven
application) by writing the code manually, line by line. I'd argue
that you'll learn better this way and that the things that you produce
will contain less magic and you'll at least have some context.

Whichever route you take you need to pick up:

1) User Interface Design. No different than writing a desktop app, one
needs to consider how the app will be used and the best way to present
the information.

2) Interface build using HTML to mark-up the information displayed and
CSS to change how it looks and where it's placed. Contempory web
development best practice is to separate the two out so the HTML can
be re-styled for different users/devices easily. For example not using
tables for layout & avoiding the use of HTML tags that define the way
the information should be presented. By the sounds of things you may
not need to worry about this for your project at work but it's still
worth bearing in mind, especially if you want your new skills to be
transferrable at some point in the future.

3) Either accepting from the user or pulling from a database the
information that drives the application. This, as you state, is stored
in a MS SQL Server DB. So you'll need to get to grips with writing SQL
queries to read or write from the DB, plus write some ASP code to
connect to the database server and run these SQL queries

4) Infrastructure. The MS web server is IIS and this can be configured
to serve ASP and HTML pages (amongst others). You may only need to
concern yourself with this if you are gonig to set yourself up a locel
dev environment (whch is probably not a bad idea).

http://www.w3schools.com/ is an excellent resource containing oodles
of examples and reference materials.

Good luck

--
Darren Beale
07711 716 197

http://bealers.com

_______________________________________________
Malvern mailing list
Malvern at mailman.lug.org.uk
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/malvern