|
||
|
|
|
|
||
| PrecisionPros.com > Ecommerce for Free > Table of Contents | ||||||||
|
|
ECOMMERCE FOR FREE TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Unlike many books that attempt to survey all possible solutions without providing a comprehensive solution this book contains all the code necessary to actually build a functioning web site. The book is accompanied by a companion web site that contains the actual sample e-commerce example site detailed in this book. You can browse the web site, add products to your shopping cart and even purchase these items. Your purchases will support the starving authors of this book as they search relentlessly for new topics to bring to their publisher!This section contains a quick overview of what you will find in each chapter of this book. Preface: Covering the topics Open Source Software, Why use Open Source Tools, Why Learn Ecommerce Development, Who Should Read This Book and What You Should Know to Read This Book. Chapter 1, Ecommerce Architecture: This chapter will present an overview of a typical E-commerce application -- the shopping cart, which is the subject of this book. Here, the architecture of the shopping cart application, presented in this book, will be defined. A discussion of each of the major pieces will be provided along with information about obtaining the pieces from the open source community. Chapter 2, CGI Boot Camp: This chapter talks the reader through configuring the apache web server and getting some simple web pages up and running. It then goes on to discuss the CGI interface in more detail and provides several CGI programming examples. CGI is first illustrated with simple shell commands and then using both Tcl and Perl. Chapter 3, Database Essentials: Since a major part of e-commerce development centers around dynamic access to relational databases it is essential to have a good understanding of database basics. This chapter provides all the knowledge necessary to comprehend the remaining material in this book. Chapter 4, The Shopping Cart Schema: covers the database schema for our shopping cart. The first step in building an effective shopping cart is to design the data model or schema that will be used to construct the database. Some issues, particular to the MySQL database, such as the lack of foreign key support will be highlighted along with suggestions on how to overcome these small inconveniences. Chapter 5, Web Access: contains some simple examples on how to access our shopping cart database from the World Wide Web. This chapter introduces the basic concepts used for CGI access to the database. Some of the problems tackled here include how to set up the CGI program with the appropriate passwords and permissions to access the MySQL database. Examples in both Tcl and Perl are be provided. Chapter 6, The Administrators View: In order to operate a successful Ecommerce web site it is necessary to have a convenient way for the site administrator to perform routine maintenance of the database. This chapter expands on the simple web access examples given in chapter 4 by providing a generic administrators panel that can be used to manipulate the database from any web browser. The administrators panel allows for the addition, modification, and deletion of data in the database. The screens are built dynamically from the current database schema and allow two methods of operating on the data. The first is a series of HTML forms that resemble each table in a selected database. The second provides a simple web browser interface for execution of any standard SQL command. Chapter 7, Analyzing the Shopping Cart: Each product screen in our Ecommerce web site allows the user to make a selection and add it to their shopping cart. This is not as straightforward as it might be in other programming environments. Since the World Wide Web is a stateless protocol it does not provide a means to track this type of information. This means that our application will have to provide the necessary state information for each transaction. This chapter discusses several methods for accomplishing this and then focuses on the one provided by our application. Chapter 8, Product Screens with CGI: In this chapter we detail the creation of the various product screens using CGI scripts. Examples in both Perl and Tcl will be provided. You will see how to track your customer's order from screen to screen, how to associate pictures with your product info and includes many suggestions for streamlining the development of your web pages. It also includes valuable information on debugging your scripts. Chapter 9, Product Screens with PHP: Although CGI programming is one of the most widely accepted methods of developing web sites, an alternate solution can be employed. This alternate solution is know as an application server and it provides you the ability to embed directives inside your HTML source code which provide the same functionality of the CGI programs discussed in chapter 8. There are a number of proprietary application servers that exist in the market today including Microsoft's Active Server Pages, Alure's Cold Fusion and Haht Software's Hoht site. The most widely utilized open source solution for application server technology is known as PHP. This chapter mimics the information presented in the chapter 8 but details the creation of the product screen using the PHP language rather than CGI programs. Chapter 10, Handling Payment: The singular most important reason for developing an Ecommerce web site is to sell your products. Accepting on-line payments is therefore an important aspect of Ecommerce development. This chapter presents several view points on handling payment from your customers. Security is a major concern when handling credit card transactions on the Internet. This chapter will describe Digital Certificates and the use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to insure that credit card information is kept from the prying eyes of today's sophisticated hackers. Chapter 11, Generating Additional Income: Now that you can build a successful web site it's time to explore some additional sources of revenue. This chapter will discuss banners, click-throughs and some additional mechanisms that you can employ to earn additional revenue over and above the selling of your own products. By directing your customers to related web sites you can make extra money. Back to "E-Commerce for Free" Page Frequently Asked Questions |
|
|||||
|
6543 East Omega St., Mesa, Arizona 85215 About Us Products & Services Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy Contact Us |
|
||||||
