Gunnit Khurana, Dr Balbir Khurana, and Satwant Gadhok are recognized authors in the field of Web application development. They have written the following resource guides for online database publishing.

There is no doubt that all these Web-database unification ceremonies possess some alluring attraction—some claim swiftness, some portray elegance, while others just charm developers with their simplicity. One such popular ceremony that utilizes the Microsoft Access database management system, Windows Common Gateway Interface, and Visual Basic programming has appealed to a lot of developers because it provides a balanced blend of all these attractions.

Visual Basic Web Database Interactive Course is all about the ins and outs of this ceremony. This book exposes the inherent beauty of the Web, describes the powerful character of Microsoft Access, and provides the reader with the thrill and adventure of Web-database application development using Visual Basic. The whole experience is made more meaningful and practical through a ready-to-use Web event calendar application that is consistently developed all through the book from the ground up. Every concept explained in this book eventually finds its place in this application.

This book is about integrating two complementary technologies, the Web and the relational database management system (RDMS), using a glue called the Windows Common Gateway Interface. As the title of this book suggests, we explain this integration process through a step-by-step construction kit approach.

Overall, this book is written to explain the following:

• How to create and query a relational database
• The elements of the Web and how they function together
• How data is transferred between a Web site and a Web user
• How the Windows Common Gateway Interface works
• How to link a database with the Web
• How to design commercial-grade Web-based database applications

Underlying all these objectives, we maintain another important objective: keep it simple. To do this, we have based the book on three software packages that have acquired high honors for being both powerful and user friendly.

We used O'Reilly & Associates' WebSite™ 1.1 as our Web server (the book includes its evaluation copy on the accompanying CD-ROM, Microsoft Access 95 as our relational database management system, and Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 (32-bit Professional version) as our CGI programming language.

Although we have selected these popular packages for our construction kit, the concepts we describe are general in nature and can be applied using other software packages with similar capabilities. For example, most sample applications discussed in this book will run on Netscape, Alibaba, Purveyor, or any other Windows CGI-compatible Web server.