Preface

My programming career started in the mid-nineties as a web developer for a local school district. Web as in http, that is. Netscape Navigator was helping to grow the number of households with internet modems, because it was more advanced than anything else at the time. Netscape Navigator 3.0 (1996), and 3.04 (1997), helped households and businesses all over the world open up the internet for common uses. And there is no more common task than shopping! With the advent of e-commerce, the internet exploded with a capitalist gold rush.

I started web development in the public sector, ironically, where we leveraged the first threads of social networking by allowing school district graduates to collaborate with other former classmates. I started my career on the Microsoft platform using IDC (Internet Database Connector) with HTX (HTML Extension Template). Internet Information Services (IIS) 2.0 gave us fantastic flexibility against ODBC data sources. This was my first use of the “code nugget,” or <% %> delimiters. IDC/HTX gave way to Active Server Pages (ASP), and I can still recall following the breaking changes from ASP 2.0 to ASP 3.0 as well as the awesome COM+ integration when it was introduced. I dabbled in CGI, Perl, Java, and C++ along the way, but I stayed with the Microsoft platform. I observed the Visual Basic explosion largely from the sidelines, although I did learn the ropes with some small utility apps.