ASP: a tutorial for beginners

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What is ASP? Which is ASP basic syntax? Objects, methods, properties, events and collections?
AH! Do we really know what we are talking about?

The following post is just a quick reference guide for all those things. It is meant for beginners, but I believe that even experienced programmers might find it useful... just to check if everything we know is correct.

What is ASP?

ASP stands for Active Server Page. In a previous post I've already defined it as a scripting engine. That is because we usually and wrongfully consider ASP as a programming language.
We can use different programming languages in ASP pages, such as VBScript or JScript. Usually, web developers use VBScript, which is ASP default language.
The ASP engine is managed by IIS (Internet Information Services), working in a MS Windows environment. I know that it is possible to use ASP with other web server applications such as Apache.
It is worth mentioning that ASP is working with PWS as well. PWS (Personal Web Server) is a small but fully functional version of IIS and it was available on older operating systems like WIN 95 and 98 (oh what a leap in the past!).

HTML & ASP: form methods, get or post?

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"In forms, should I use 'get' or 'post' when defining the method?"

This was a question a friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago. I thought he was joking, and I tried to find a humorous answer in the back of my mind. Finding none (as I'm a serious guy!), I answered with the usual backup phrase: "It depends". That gave me enough time to think, search my brain database for a technical explanation, and then provide a complete and reasonable answer to his question.
The problem was that the first word which came to my mind was 'idempotent'. I ended up answering his question, without using the word 'idempotent'. And believe me, my friend was happy enough with my answer. The debate went on and we talked about the different way of using the submitted data with ASP.

My friend is not really new to programming in HTML or ASP, but confessed that he has always been confused by the two form methods. That gave me the idea to write the following post.