What This Book Wont Cover

What This Book Won t Cover

This book is specifically about using ASP.NET and Web Matrix to program Web pages. There are dozens of other aspects to creating Web pages, and alas, this book cannot cover them all. In this book, I m not going to try to teach you about the following topics:

• HTML. I assume that you know enough HTML to know the basic tags and be comfortable working with them.

• Graphical tools. A lot of the fun of Web sites is in creating cool graphics and animations, but this isn t the book for learning about those. We ll play with existing graphics, but I m not going to provide any details on graphical formats.

• Commercial Web sites. Many of the techniques you ll learn in this book can be used for commercial sites. However, I ve deliberately avoided making this a book for commercial Web site developers. A book like this one can t really get into the complex technical and legal issues associated with e-commerce. In addition, the book won t describe how to create Web sites that can handle commercial-grade traffic, which is a job for a Web site administrator who knows about hardware, among other things.

• Database programming. We re going to use databases because many of the interesting features of programmed Web sites rely on data. But it s not my goal to turn you into a database expert. Some of the examples involve some database work that is not trivial; for those examples, I ll explain as we go.

Finally, as I said earlier, this book isn t out to teach you exhaustively about Web programming with ASP.NET. As a result, I m not going to focus on creating the most efficient code possible, or squeezing maximum performance from your Web site, or any of the other issues that professional Web site developers need to worry about. Having said that, once you ve finished this book, you might find it interesting to move on and learn more about Web programming from the professional point of view it s an endlessly fascinating subject.