Visual Basic

[David G. Risner]

On Wed, 27 Mar 1996, AGJOSEPH wrote:

> I would like to know if Visual Basic will help you in your Web
> page development?  I know how to do the html tagging, but not
> the very fancy things.  I have created some pages with images
> in them.  Somebody suggested that visual basic will be a good
> course to consider taking.  Our univeristy does not offer
> that course.  I have to go to another university and pay for it
> by myself.  What do you all think?  Is it worth spending that
> much money for developing and maintaining our pages?

What operating system & web server are you using?

For developing stuff for web pages, Perl or C (or C++) would probably be 
more useful than Visual Basic right now.  In the future, Visual Basic 
might be a good thing to know; although, as someone who has used Visual 
Basic, I would say that Perl & C will be the choice for a while because 
how slow VB is.

For simple additions to your web pages, you might try learning 
Javascript.  It looks fairly simple.  It will only work with Netscape 
browsers though.

There is also Java itself, which only works with Netscape right now.  You 
will need Windows 95, NT or a Unix machine to write Java programs.

Do note that there are two different functions for "programs" on the 
web:

There are CGI scripts which take input, usually from a form, and then output
an HTML page.  These could be in Perl, C, Java, VB, C++, shell scripts, and
just about any other language.  These run on the server. 

Then there are applets and inline scripts which are actually part of an HTML
document and run on the client's machine.  These do things like spinning
graphics, text scrolling at the bottom, etc.  This is what Javascript & Java
are for.  (Microsoft is now in alpha testing for Visual Basic Script 
which will work with Internet Explorer). 

Personally, I would learn Perl first.  You can do CGI with it and you'll
learn about programming as a whole.  There is also a lot of help on the Net
for doing CGI with Perl.  If you stick with CGI, you might want to learn C++
eventually as it is faster to run if your server is getting a lot of hits. 
Java is similar in structure to C++ and seems to be becoming the standard for
applets.  So jumping to Java when you want to write applets shouldn't be
difficult (I haven't done this yet, so I don't really know if that's true or
not). 

Good luck.

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David G. Risner                                         dgrisner at netcom.com
Southwestern University School of Law Library               Los Angeles, CA
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