by Keith Brophy, Timothy Koets
How important is VBScript to the future of computing? How important is it to you? Does it give you new capabilities that you can't get in other languages, or is it just another choice in a sea laden with confusing buzzwords? If you've pondered questions like these, you're not alone. VBScript is one of the most exciting new players in the rapidly expanding universe of technologies loosely termed the Internet. The purpose of this book is to teach you how to use VBScript. As a brief prerequisite to that journey, consider why VBScript is such an important part of the Web page development arsenal. Perhaps the best way to understand the potential of this future-centered technology is to take a look at how far the Internet has come. You might find that you have been involved in many of the trends leading up to the advent of VBScript without even realizing it, just as the authors have been.
A little over a decade ago, one of the authors was producing Department of Defense software and the reams of documentation that go along with it. One of the requirements in putting together this documentation stipulated that it should be generated in a markup language called SGML. This markup language was quite cumbersome. For example, it required that each heading start with an h1 tag and each paragraph with a p tag. Eventually, this project came to an end, and it seemed that this memory was just a relic of the past. Then, along came the World Wide Web. Behold: The World Wide Web is based on a page description language inherited to a large extent from SGML! The tag-oriented approach for Web pages succeeded precisely because it leaves the work of presenting Web pages to the browser. This approach provides an efficient, low-overhead means for communicating across the Internet because it enables the information sent across the network to be content-centered while the browser takes care of the cosmetic details on its own....
A little over a decade ago, one of the authors was producing Department of Defense software and the reams of documentation that go along with it. One of the requirements in putting together this documentation stipulated that it should be generated in a markup language called SGML. This markup language was quite cumbersome. For example, it required that each heading start with an h1 tag and each paragraph with a p tag. Eventually, this project came to an end, and it seemed that this memory was just a relic of the past. Then, along came the World Wide Web. Behold: The World Wide Web is based on a page description language inherited to a large extent from SGML! The tag-oriented approach for Web pages succeeded precisely because it leaves the work of presenting Web pages to the browser. This approach provides an efficient, low-overhead means for communicating across the Internet because it enables the information sent across the network to be content-centered while the browser takes care of the cosmetic details on its own....
This book is intended to be completed in 21 days-one chapter per day-although the pace is really up to you. We have designed the book as a teacher would teach a course. We start with the basics and continue to introduce more of the language to you as the chapters progress. By the end of the first week, you will be creating your first VBScript Web page. As you work through the chapters, you will continue to design Web pages using VBScript that will become increasingly more powerful. In the second and third weeks, you will be exploring the more advanced features VBScript provides. In addition to instruction, we will furnish an abundance of examples, as well as exercises for you to try. You can learn a great deal by reading, but only when you try building a few VBScript Web pages of your own can you become truly experienced.