[gazzareth]

Hi,

I have a business idea of selling a certain form of stock on the internet (and in the real world but through mail order/catalouge) and am wondering if there are any good books people can recomend on creating a website for this purpose, especially programming the shopping cart, checkout etc...

I have XHTML programming experience (actually have a test i shopuld be studying for tomorrow for it, in my computer science course)...but as of yet i have not moved onto online shopping etc....

Any good books out there, websites about it......or anywhere cheap i can get it done?


thanks for the help,

Gareth Egan

[Dus10]

Well, ideally, you would need to use a programming language to create programs on the server-side to handle requests and storing data. You must think of these things as real applications, and not an HTML formatted document. With these programming languages, you basically output HTML.

You can just use "off the shelf" shopping carts and such, but they may lack feature X that you would like, and you wouldn't know too much about its internals.

I would recommend that you learn some language that is optimized for the task, especially since you are a computer science major. PHP is very easy to learn, extensible, scalable, and robust. It is first and foremost, a web programming language. The server will have to support it, but that is easy enough, as nearly all *nix based hosting packages do.

[gazzareth]

thanks Dus10,

thanks for that advice, i considered PHP and yes thought it was the option to go. I'm only 6 months through my course and have at the moment only learnt C++ and XHTML, but will be getting a book out from my college libaray on PHP asap.

thanks for the help once again,



Gareth Egan

[Dus10]

if you know C++, PHP should be cake for you. PHP is yet another C based language.... so shouldn't be much of anything.

[gazzareth]

ah yeah thats great, haven't done much looking into programming languages. Mainly just C++, VB and Java.

beenm to busy reading up on management and business lol


thanks again