Author's note: This was originally published in September 2000.  It has been only slightly revised and republished in March 2005.  Also, if you're just learning ASP, I strongly recommend you jump to ASP.NET instead.

Return to this site often with your questions about data access in ASP. If you have specific questions, please email them to me (click my name). The purpose of this tutorial is to give you basic familiarity with data access using Active Server Pages. This page will also include a FAQ(Frequently Asked Questions) page, which will most likely duplicate some of the very important knowledge listed on other FAQs on this site, but which many new users still ask on the newsgroups and listservs several times per week. I figure this increases the chance that the right person will find the answer to their question before wasting bandwidth.

To access the FAQ, click here (note - old content will be kept, but no new questions will be answered). Otherwise, continue on with the ADO tutorial, beginning in 3 ... 2... 1... start:

Greetings! Welcome to Data Access with Active Server Pages 201. Hopefully you've completed the 100 course series which is recommended but not required prior to signing up for this course. This course is graded pass/fail based on attendance only, so you need not fear for your grades. My name is Steve and I'll be your instructor.

To begin, you will need a machine on which you can test some sample scripts. The easiest way to accomplish this if you haven't already done so is to download ASP from Microsoft and install it with PWS on your Win95 or WinNT box. There are plenty of resources available for describing how to do this, so I won't waste any more time on it.  (If you have XP Pro, and install IIS, you'll have ASP.  If you have XP Home, you're out of luck unless you can hack it to host a webserver for ASP -- if you want to do ASP.NET, then you can use Cassini).