In the last two weeks, three friends have approached me asking how they can get into Web development: a university professor who wants to create a virtual community for his students, an owner of a language school who wants to get into e-commerce, and an English teacher looking for a lucrative career move. My advice to all of them was the same: learn XHTML, ASP.NET and database servers.Why XHTML

XHTML is the core of the Web

From the simplest Web site to the most complex e-commerce solution, XHTML is the script that is ultimately sent down to the visitors’ browsers. There is no getting around it: if you want to do Web development, you need to know XHTML. The good thing is that HTML is relatively easy to learn. It is not a programming language so there are no for-next loops, no variables, and nothing about sessions or functions to learn. It is just a mark-up script, which means that you merely surround text with tags which tell the browser to treat that text specially. To see how easy it is, take my Learn HTML by the end of the hour you will have created your first Web site and learned the most important XHTML tags. It’s really that easy.

After you have made your first home page come up in a browser, learn more by getting an XHTML editor such as Dreamweaver or VIsual Studio Web Developer which allows you to create pages in a Word-like environment and then look at the automatically generated XHTML text. Such an editor is one of the best XHTML learning tools that there is - if you want to learn how to create a colored table, then create one and look at the XHTML code. To learn more, change the code a bit and look at the table again. Keep doing this until you get an understanding of how the XHTML code affects the display in the browser. XHTML is simple enough that experimenting in this way will speed-teach most of practical XHTML skills you need.

After you get a sense of the relationship between XHTML tags and their output in the browser, get a good-sized, comprehensive book on XHTML and work through it at quick pace. It’s not important you understand each tag in depth, but it is important that you have an overview of all the XHTML tags so that you can spot them in the code and know what is available to you when you are designing pages. After you have worked through a book like this, you will have a good theoretical basis of XHTML, which is important when you start programming in ASP.NET.

ASP.NET is a powerful server-side script

Only knowing XHTML is limiting because all you can do is create static pages. What if you have a list of students, for example, which you want to sometimes display sorted by last name, sometimes sorted by grade, and sometimes want to show only those who have finished a specific assignment? For this you need to have this information in a database and use ASP.NET to dynamically send only the information you want to your visitors’ browsers.

To develop sites with ASP, you first need to set up the ASP.NET programming environment on your computer, which can be difficult if you have never done it before. The easiest way to do this is to take visual studio 2005 

and sql server 2005  which will enable you to get an ASP.NET developing environment up within the hour, complete with a working ASP.NET page which reads data from an MS SQL database.

Next you need to learn ASP.MET. For most non-programmers this is going to involve a learning curve.  Also, if you have never programmed in a client/server environment, you will go through a paradigm shift trying to understand the five server objects: application, server, session, response and request. The good thing is that you don't have to understand everything about ASP.NET to start making useful ASP.NET applications. My advice is to get a good book on ASP.NET and work through it at your own pace pulling out of it only that which you can use for your own particular Web application project, then keep the book within arm's reach for reference. 

Database connectivity: where the rubber hits the road

ASP.NET applications without database are not much more useful than plain XHTML pages. Hence, you will want to learn database connectivity from the very beginning of your ASP.NET learning. Spend your time learning how to read, write, delete and edit data in databases from your ASP.NET pages. This is where the real power of an ASP.NET application lies.

Although ASP.NET can talk to almost any database, Microsoft SQL 2005 is the best database to use with ASP.NET, and you will need to have a copy installed on your machine before you begin programming database connectivity into ASP.NET. MS SQL 2005 will work, too, of course. You can go to microsoft.com/downloads and there you search this product.

Today, you can get excellent books on database connectivity using ASP.NET, and in our forums have hundreds of code samples for you to try out and learn from.

Hosting your ASP Web site

When it is time to put your ASP.NET Web site on the Internet for others to use, Web hosting services such as aspspider.com will host your database-generated ASP Web site for free.

Not easy, but possible and very powerful

In the final, learning ASP.NET and database connectivity is not as easy as learning how to use other Windows applications. Programming involves another level of involvement and learning which for some is simply not a joy. However, if you are excited about learning basic programming skills and can invest a couple of months learning and experimenting with this technology, you will come out with skills with which you can create robust and useful database-generated Web applications such as virtual classrooms or e-commerce Web sites. You will also be able to market yourself as a highly paid Web developer. More power to you!