What You Need to Use This Book

The prerequisite system requirements for this book are intentionally very small so that someone with even the most basic system would be able to get to use the contents of the book with minimal hassle. This book requires that you have one of the following installed in order to run the examples in the book:

• Any version of Windows XP

• Windows 2000

You do not need to have a dedicated web server, such as Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), installed to host your web applications since Web Matrix comes with a web server built into it. This is perfectly adequate for everything you will learn in this book but it would be a good upgrade if you want to use more advanced features later on.