The
best way to understand Internet Programming
is by understanding what it can do for you.
Consider the following scenarios:
1) You create a form prompting
users for information and you save that
information to a database for future use.
Users sign up for your mailing list and
you now need a way to send personalized
e-mail messages to them.
2) You want to secure
your site, allowing only registered users
to access it, and allowing users with differing
security levels access to different content.
3) You create
an interactive scheduling and calendaring application
in Macromedia Flash and want to populate it with
information from a database.
4) You create a shopping cart
site and want to list item availability in real
time (which requires checking databases that integrate
with point-of-sale systems).
The common denominator here
is that none of these needs can be addressed using
client-side technology alone.
While Web Design software enables
you to obtain powerful and rich user interfaces,
you need more - you need something that provides
power on the back end, something that can respond
to your rich interfaces, something that can be
the server-side compliment to your client-side
design work.
And that something is Internet
Programming