Book excerpt: What is this book about? For a web site to offer its users an experience that improves on that of newspapers or textbooks, it needs a way to change the information it contains dynamically - and that means it needs access to a data source. Through the combination of ASP.NET and ADO.NET, Microsoft provides everything necessary to access, read from, and write to a database, and then allow web users to view and manipulate that data from a web browser. In this book, we'll show you how it's done. What does this book cover? Packed with clear explanations and hands-on examples, Beginning ASP.NET Databases contains everything you'll need on your journey to becoming a confident, successful programmer of data-driven web sites. In particular, we'll look at: Connecting to common data sources, including SQL Server and MS Access Reading data with data reader and dataset objects Creating and deleting records, and editing data Displaying data with ASP.NET's web server controls Writing and using stored procedures from VB.NET code Placing your data access code in reusable class libraries The book closes with a real-world case study that consolidates the tutorials throughout the book into a practical result. Who is this book for? To use this book, you need a computer running either Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional Edition. The examples it contains will not run on Windows XP Home Edition. This book is for people who have some experience of programming ASP.NET with Visual Basic .NET, are familiar with the operation of the .NET Framework, and want to learn how to use ASP.NET to make data-centric web applications. No prior knowledge of database programming is necessary.