3.0.0- Basic ASP Techniques

Basic ASP Techniques

When I first started to study Chinese my tutor, Lao Wang, gave me a Chinese–English dictionary, a Chinese grammar book and a primer. But he placed all of these books in a basket and said that they were not to be used until the next week. In the first week he instructed me just to listen and memorize some phrases. Before beginning a rigorous and orderly study he wanted me to learn how to repeat a few phrases. "Excuse me, where is a restaurant?" "Please sir, may I have some rice?" "How much does this cost?" That week, I had to accept on faith the content, sentence structure, pronunciation and grammar. But by Friday I could at least walk into a Chinese restaurant, order a bowl of rice and pay for it. Those first few phrases, without theory or explanation, gave me enough grammar and vocabulary to get by.

We will take the same approach in this book. After this chapter you will get an in-depth study of the syntax and techniques of ASP, but to start, we want to give you three basic techniques. Here we won't explain the theory, exceptions or intricacies; those will come later. But at the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• Create a web page that asks the user a question and returns the answer to another ASP page
• Instruct ASP to retain the information supplied by the user
• Use ASP code to write a line of text back to the user

So without further ado, let's get started.