Who Should Read This Book?

I wrote this book for the developer who wants to understand the underlying Win32 programming elements that make server-based development possible. In order to get the most from this book, you should be familiar with C++, especially the Microsoft Visual C++ programming environment. It is not essential that you have extensive experience with the Win32 API, but it won't hurt.

The Active Server Pages (ASP) and Internet Server API (ISAPI) examples in this book assume that you have some familiarity with Internet Information Server (IIS). The ASP examples also assume some familiarity with VBScript or Microsoft Visual Basic. Familiarity is not essential, however, because most of the VBScript used in the examples simply accesses methods of objects, something any C++ programmer will likely be comfortable doing. One of the examples uses JScript created on the server to be passed to the client. You'll also need to know JScript to understand the details of the example, but understanding the broader implications of creating client-side scripting and sending it to the client does not require knowledge of JScript.

Some examples use Microsoft SQL Server, both as a simple data source and as a sever-side development environment. Using SQL Server as a server-side development environment does require some understanding of SQL.