Assumptions

This book assumes that you have a hands-on role in the creation and ongoing life of a web site. It will not help you decide if you should build a web site, what kind of web site to build, or whom to hire if you can't build it yourself. If you oversee or manage one or more web designers, web programmers or other web experts, you may find useful background information in the book's solutions. Their true value, however, will be apparent to those who can implement the solutions on a working web site.

Many of the more technical recipesincluding those that cover server setup, dynamic web pages, and database techniquesoverwhelmingly favor the open-source, or LAMP, approach. By LAMP, I mean Linux (or, more generally, Unix) for the server platform, the Apache web server, MySQL as database server, and the PHP scripting language. By far, most solutions are platform-agnostic and alternatives for the Windows Internet Information Server (IIS) platform worth mentioning are noted in the "See Also" sections of selected recipes.

You should have a working knowledge of HMTL code. Although WYSIWYG-oriented site builders will find much in this book that will help them improve their work, the code samples presented in many of the solutions are geared toward those who are comfortable reading and writing web page source code. On the other hand, several recipes describe server command-line instructions, JavaScript functions, and moderately complex PHP routines in a step-by-step method intended to help newcomers become more familiar with these common web techniques and technologies.