Duck Hole Farm, LLC

Website Development

I began my studies by subscribing to an inexpensive web hosting plan with a shared Windows server, as most of my experience involves Windows software. This book is a beginner-friendly but comprehensive treatment of Active Server Pages. It explains the structure and interactions of the server, the client (browser), and the software, and then it provides detailed installation and configuration instructions for putting Microsoft IIS on your PC. This permits you to locally test your work before uploading to the host server. The authors cover VBScript, MS Access, SQL Server, basic XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and a limited treatment of DOM (Document Object Model).

This book is all you need to learn to create a dynamic ASP site!

VBScript (Visual Basic Script) is fine, but if you want to be able to use existing scripts you find on the web then you will also need to understand JavaScript. This book is a very thorough tutorial on JavaScript; it makes extensive use of examples to walk the reader through the language. A bound-in companion CD contains all of the source code found in the book; it even includes a PDF version of the book itself. This is very handy for studying on the road, as you can have the entire book on your laptop!

My only complaint is that the authors do not make a clear distinction between JavaScript code running on the server and code running in the browser. In fact, they discourage server-side JavaScript.

After I had created several ASP sites, I realized that I also needed to know how to create dynamic sites to run on Linux servers. I upgraded my hosting plan and switched to a shared Linux/Apache server. Although there are a number of popular scripting languages for this environment, PSP appears to be the most popular and widespread. This book provides a solid understanding of PHP, and it teaches the concepts of relational databases in general and MySQL in particular. I feel that this book is to the Linux server what the ASP book (above) is to the Windows server.

What's more, a bound-in companion CD includes the entire book in PDF format, plus installable copies of Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. The book provides detailed installation and configuration instructions for adding these to your PC for local testing.

So far, I had gotten introductions to XML from all of the books mentioned above, but there were many unanswered questions. This book explains all you will ever want to know about XML technology (and more!). While the book provides an excellent tutorial and explains the historical background as well, it then proceeds to explain how this technology may be used to perform all of your web tasks in the future, walk the dog, and make the coffee. The book is a very comprehensive survey.

I especially liked the chapter that explains how to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) with XML. This considerably increased my understanding of the power of CSS, and I have begun to use a CSS on all of my sites.

Now I had acquired a good collection of tools, but I needed some guidance regarding the design aspects of the job. This book discusses web standards (including xhtml), browser compatibility, accessibility (for handicapped users), site structure, style sheet application, web graphic formats, and multimedia elements.

There are also very useful appendices containing reference data for HTML, CSS, character sets, and web color specification.

I still needed more knowledge of the visual aspects of web design. I wanted to see a treatment on site planning, page composition, use of artwork, text layout (use of white space), user interaction, and the like. This book is a good introduction to these topics. It is directed to a much lower level than the preceeding texts, but I think it provides a good sense of direction.

As this book is published by Microsoft, it emphasizes the use of MS Publisher and MS Frontpage (now obsolescent, replaced by MS Expression Web). However, it gives a brief survey of many web, text, and graphics editing tools as well.

No bibliography would be complete without at least one "... for Dummies" book. I use the Macromedia (now Adobe) Studio suite of web design software, which includes Flash. I have long admired these web elements for their versatility and compact file size. This book provides a relatively painless entry into the Flash editing environment. I say "relatively" because the Flash editor is anything but intuitive. Once you get used to the interface, though, you have a powerful tool for breathing life into an otherwise dull page.

The book includes a bound-in companion CD with many examples for you to run and modify. It also includes trial versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash, as well as the entire book in PDF format.

... and now for something completely different... Ajax! Well, maybe not too different; Ajax stands for "Asynchronous Javascript And Xml," and it gives interactive pages a "live" feeling by speeding up the response to the actions of the user. It accomplishes this by refreshing only that part of a page that changes, rather than resending the entire page.

I wanted a general introduction to this topic, with a few working examples to get me started. This book is exactly what I was looking for. The authors provide a working knowledge of the technology, and they explain the inner workings of well known Ajax sites like the NetFlix browser and Google Gmail. As a bonus, they also provide an in-depth survey of Javascript debugging tools available on the web, and they explain how to use them.

I needed still more knowledge of graphic design and layout as applied to website design. I was pleased to find this fine 2007 book. The author concentrates almost exclusively on page layout, graphic design, color selection, and fonts; he does not permit himself to become entanged in discussions of web technology.

He provides adequate web page screenshots to illustrate his discussions, and he also provides links to similar sites. Of special interest is his explanation of "Web 2.0" page design; I was unaware of this distinction, but I can now see the difference when I come upon a web 2.0 site. Highly recommended!