Thread: Networking/Internet

there is no "the reference" for internet programming, because internet programming can mean many things. You write programs in c or C++, but web pages are made with several different languages. The basic bare bones is HTML. Then one up the ladder is CSS (a mere style language to manipulate HTML), up another rung is JavaScript or Visual Basic Script (both used to manipulate web page data and style, both are powerful tools. They are closer to programming than just about anything else as far as web pages go...excluding Perl, which is used to validate forms and is an actual programming language, but it is generally not used to manipulate web pages. On the server-side, there's PHP and ASP as the big dogs (i prefer PHP as it has greater scope and functionality, not restricted to MS servers). They are actual web programming languages ( i excluded them before as they work on the server, not the client side as javascript does.) They are used to generate web pages more or less on the fly. Very powerful, so, i suggest starting with a good book on HTML, I recommend "HTML 4, A VISUL QUICKSTART GUIDE" which can be found in any Borders book store. For Javascript, go with "The JavaScript Bible", also found at Borders (and no i don't work for Borders, It's just where i buy my books). For PHP, i find that the tutorials offered online are the best out there. The same could be said for JavaScript, however the book was excellent. For Perl (stay away from Perl, Perl is evil, but if you decide to use it to validate your forms which PHP is great at but oh well..) you can get the "Perl/CGI Cookbook" it has ready made scripts to learn from. When I started web pages, i hit the online tutorials and communities like mad, i now have 7 web languages under my belt within the last year (i am fluent in them all) i recommend webmonkey.com and w3schools.com . Good luck.

oh...I'll shut up now....