From HTML to ASP.NET Core, with PHP, Java and Python — Every website you have ever used is, underneath, a conversation: a browser asks, a server answers. Everything else in this book — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, XML, JSP, ASP.NET Core — is a way of making that conversation say something useful.

Overview

Chapters 1 to 3 build the ground: how the web works from the moment you press Enter, setting up VS Code for web development on Windows, macOS and Linux, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and PHP from zero. Chapters 5 to 7 add data and the server: PHP with MySQL and SQLite, XML and structured data, and Java Server Pages with servlets. Chapters 9 to 11 bring in ASP.NET Core and rich internet applications, the same system built three ways side by side, and dynamic pages and forms. Chapters 13 to 15 put data on the page with grids, paging and sorting, make it trustworthy with validation and state management, and give it a proper data layer with ADO.NET and transactions.

Chapters 4, 8, 12 and 16 are Evaluation and Discussion chapters. Each closes one quarter of the book by solving complete problems in full — every problem restated, designed on paper, programmed, tested, run, and explained — with the tempting wrong solution shown and taken apart, and a “check yourself” variant at the end of every problem.

Throughout, one small business grows chapter by chapter: Profitina Laundry, a laundry with three outlets in Surabaya, its customers, services, bills, payments and a year of realistic (and entirely fictitious) sample data. By the last chapter it is a complete application — login, customers, bills and their workflow, payments, receipts, a dashboard, reports and a JSON API — and it exists, finished and tested, in PHP, Java, Python and ASP.NET Core. Each chapter also has a Profitina in Practice section that shows where the same ideas appear in a real product.

Every program in this book was run before its output was printed. The programs are collected, chapter by chapter, in the accompanying Code folder, with a README in every chapter folder that explains how to run each one in a terminal and in VS Code on Windows, macOS and Linux, and a VERIFIED.md that states exactly what was executed.

Inside the Book

1. The Web, End to End
2. HTML, CSS, and the Basic Web Languages
3. PHP from Zero
4. Evaluation and Discussion I: From a Static Site to a Validated Form
5. PHP and MySQL, and Getting a Server Running
6. XML and Structured Data
7. Java Server Pages
8. Evaluation and Discussion II: A Database-Backed Web Application, from Design to Deployment
9. ASP.NET and Rich Internet Applications
10. Three Systems Demonstrated: PHP, JSP, and ASP.NET
11. Dynamic Pages and Web Forms
12. Evaluation and Discussion III: Server Pages, Forms and State, from JSP to Razor Pages
13. Data on the Page: GridView and Data Grids
14. Validation and State Management
15. ADO.NET and the Data Layer
16. Evaluation and Discussion IV: One Complete ASP.NET Application, and the Whole Book