When a company or organization wants to use the Internet, they must decide whether they want to do it by directly attaching to the Internet system or whether they will use another company to supply the connection. Many companies choose to use another company, called a service provider, because it reduces the amount of equipment, administration, and costs involved. If the company or organization wants to directly connect (and sometimes when they are using a service provider), t....

A Web server is the server software behind the World Wide Web. It listens for requests from a client, such as a browser like Netscape or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. When it gets one, it processes that request and returns some data. This data usually takes the form of a formatted page with text and graphics. The browser then renders this data to the best of its ability and presents it to the user. Web servers are in concept very simple programs. They await for requests....

We saw at the beginning of this section that one way to embed client-side JavaScript into HTML documents is to use event handler attributes of HTML tags. The following table lists the standard event handler attributes and the HTML tags to which they may be applied. The first column of the table gives the event handler attribute name: these names always begin with "on". The second column of the table lists the HTML tags to which these attributes can be applied, and ex....

In 1994, an incredibly forward-thinking man named Rasmus Lerdorf developed a set of tools that used a parsing engine to interpret a few macros here and there. They were not extravagant: a guest book, a counter, and some other "home page" elements that were cool when the Web was in its infancy. He eventually combined these tools with a form interpretation (FI) package he had written, added some database support, and released what was known as PHP/FI.Then, in the spiri....

In 2001, Safeware(http://www.safeware.com) estimated that thieves stole over 500,000 laptops for that year but only 15,000 desktop computers. Laptops make the most obvious and enticing targets because of their small size, light weight, and high resale value, so if you’re traveling with a laptop in public, do your best to hide it. Walk through any airport and you’ll see many people carrying their laptops in distinctive black carrying cases, easily....