Summary

In this chapter we've learned about the difference between static and dynamic web pages, and we've talked about some of the different ways in which you can add dynamic behavior to your web pages. This book focuses on ASP as a technology for writing dynamic web pages, so we have looked at some of the main advantages that ASP-generated HTML offers over pure hard-coded HTML, and why you might want to use ASP to enhance your web pages. There are other technologies on the Web that also rely on server-side processing, but we haven't considered them here.

We have looked at the things you'll need to run ASP, and where you can find them. We've covered how to set up IIS 5.0, and how to set up a directory in which to place the examples that we'll meet in the remainder of this book.

We created our first ASP page, and viewed it; we looked at some of the common pitfalls that you might encounter when checking that your ASP example is correctly set up. In order to provide a general overview of why you'd want use ASP, we've avoided detailed explanation of ASP code, and how to write the ASP scripts within your .asp files. We'll move onto that in forthcoming chapters.

Here's a reminder of some things we learned in this chapter, which are worth remembering at all times:

• You can use any text editor to create an ASP page
• ASP code is processed on the web server, and then the subsequent HTML code it creates is sent back to the browser
• You can use any modern browser to view an ASP page

In the next chapter we'll take a closer look at the differences between running your programs on the server and running them on the client; and we'll investigate why we might choose one of these in preference to the other.