I'm comfortable with my abilities to use MX for website design. I know about every corner of the software except incorporating a database to the site.

My question is do I spend the energy to learn how to use MX to automate data output/input or do I learn how to do it using straight ASP?

What would your suggestion be to someone starting at the beginning of the learning curve?

Opinion only, right? OK.

Use DMX to show you how to do the basics. If you're a programmer, you'll immediately see ways to do things better or more efficiently. I am an old mainframe guy (who found myself unemployed after Y2K), so I'm used to hand-coding 5000 line programs, but even when I was doing that I'd never rewrite something that I'd already written.

I use DMX, and I use alot of the built-in functions. I do understand every word of the code that DMX writes, and sometimes I rewrite them to make a process flow better, and I almost never put up a page that DMX wrote without some custom code, but the hard truth is that most clients aren't paying for that kind of attention.

For reference, get a copy of ASP 2.0 or ASP 3.0 from WROX (I use ChiliSoft and MySQL on Linux servers, so ASP 2.0 is correct for me, but it depends on what server you're writing for).

When it comes down to it, ASP is nothing but VBScript or Javascript run serverside with some nifty toys built in. You can use other scripting languages, of course, but VBScript and JavaScript are the most common.

Also consider PHP. There's a big movement within the developer community towards it, and DMX supports it, but from the posts I've seen here, it does it rather poorly. The code itself is very efficient, and it can do things that ASP/JavaScript/VBScript can't touch, at least without alot of code.

Ned Frankly
www.nedfrankly.com
You think I ramble on HERE?

Although I am relatively new to both ASP and DMX I've been using Dreamweaver for about 3 years and I always tell this to people who ask me why bother learning HTML/DHTML when you can use simply use Dreamweaver, I always tell them why did you bother learning math when you can simply use a calculator.
My point is Dreamweaver can do a great deal of things for you, but if you know the basics you can do much more. Plus sometimes as mentioned before you have to get your hands dirty to touch up some of the DMX code which might need some tweaking.
Just my opinion naturally

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>
I'm comfortable with my abilities to use MX for website design. I know about every corner of the software except incorporating a database to the site.

My question is do I spend the energy to learn how to use MX to automate data output/input or do I learn how to do it using straight ASP?

What would your suggestion be to someone starting at the beginning of the learning curve?


<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

"If it weren't for the last minute, nothing I would get nothing done"

Do you want my honest opinion ?

I've been struggling with ASP code for over a year now, i still make stupid mistakes and now with this .NET around the corner it will even grow worse.
I was told to evaluate ColdFusion MX and I was stunned, in under a month I was handcoding my database output, i even started writing my own simple routines which i could never get right in ASP/Jscript and for me ASP/VB wasn't much easier so I stuck with the big site in Jscript, i'm now still in the proces of convincing the money people although they are vastly cheated by those smooth talkers from Microsoft. Oh, ASP comes free with every win2k and NT4 IIS server...They're not telling them that .NET 2003 is NOT free. And after not using CFML for a month or 3 I could still understand my pages upon seeing the code. .NET has a bigger learning curve by FAR. Relying on behaviors only isn't good in the long run.

That's my honest opinion, I hope it helps you in deciding what to do.

With kind regards,

Dennis van Galen
Webmaster KPN Services
Financial and Information Services

I appreciate the honest feedback. I think I will continue down my course of letting MX "teach" me how to code.