Connecting databases to the world wide web is an increasingly important skill for computer scientists and MIS/BIS as the WWW breaks down the traditional barriers of information sharing across organisations, allowing this vital process to be done cheaply and efficiently. Traditional database books present database design with any material on web-applications being a tackled later, almost as an afterthought. Similarly, web-development books may gloss over databases in a single chapter on SQL.

This book discusses database development but always in the context of the web. Thus it gives a genuine understanding of how to implement web databases rather than presenting one field and simply trying to ‘bolt-on’ the other afterwards. That said, it covers the core concepts of a traditional database design course and so offers the flexibility of learning database design separate from the web applications if desired.

Scripting is covered first so that, should the reader want to get the web context from the start, they understand how their application will be implemented before trying to design it.