Introduction

In Part 1 of this book, you learned that an advanced web design involves the use of a database to store information gathered or accessed by pages at a web site. In Part 2, you created a web site containing forms that asked questions. In Part 3, you wrote scripts that judged the answers. Here, in Part 4, you will learn how to store the results in a database and create data-driven web pages whose contents change dynamically depending on what is happening in the database.

This part of the book has four chapters. Following the pedagogical approach used throughout this book, they give you your choice of working from a graphical or a programmatic perspective. Chapter 16 begins by teaching you how to obtain a database program. You will learn about the different database options and their costs. In addition to installing a database program on your computer, you will discover how to obtain access to databases on third-party servers.

Chapter 17 covers database design principles. You will learn to identify and define the elements of a database. By studying the principles of relational data, you will prepare yourself to design databases that are both powerful and efficient. You will understand how normalization and indexing can streamline the access to data in large databases. In Chapter 18, you will learn how to create and interact with a database via the visual tools in FrontPage. These tools enable you to create data tables via the database design wizard, collect information entered by users on forms, and display reports of that data in a broad range of formats. You will put these tools to the very practical use of enabling your users to share things with each other. Thus, you will form a community that puts users in touch with each other through a database.

Inevitably there will come times when you want to do things that the FrontPage database wizards cannot handle. Enter Chapter 19, which teaches you how to access database objects via scripts. The database objects enable you to query, relate, compare, and make decisions based on data stored in multiple data tables. To experience the power of relational data, you will create three data tables to store information when users take a quiz. One table will identify which user took the quiz. Another table will record the answers given to each question. A third table will record final scores. By relating the data collected in these tables, you will create a grade book reporting the score that each user got on the quiz.

To round out your knowledge of databases, Chapter 20 will teach you the structured query language (SQL), which is the industry-standard language for interacting with databases. Regardless of whether you decide to create a database through visual or programmatic tools, a working knowledge of SQL will help you realize the capability and power the database provides you to store, filter, retrieve, mine, and manipulate data at your web site.