What This Book Is About

It seems like pretty much everyone uses the Web, and many people have created their own sites a personal Web page, perhaps, or a site for their family, club, hobby, church, school, or other group. Most of those sites consist of static text and pictures. (Some sites, although technologically simple, are beautiful it s astonishing what people can do with the relatively simple tools in HTML.)

There s another class of Web site, though, that s more sophisticated. (Not necessarily more graphically sophisticated, of course.) For example, some sites allow users to enter text (guestbooks or message boards) and set preferences, and the site can remember the user the next time he or she visits. These more sophisticated sites are created using programs namely, Web page programs. This book is all about creating Web page programs.

ASP.NET

The title of this book refers to Microsoft ASP.NET what s that? ASP.NET is Microsoft s platform for programming Web pages. It s a set of programs that do all the low-level work of running your programmed Web pages and working with a Web server to display them. All you have to do with ASP.NET is well, program it.

Web Matrix

Where does Web Matrix fit in? Web Matrix is a free tool from Microsoft that gives you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment for creating programmed Web pages. Web Matrix makes creating programmed Web pages as easy as dragging controls onto a page and double-clicking them to start programming. This book will teach you the basics of creating programmed Web pages using Web Matrix as your page editor and ASP.NET as the programming environment.