The Application in Action
OK, let's try the whole thing out. Fire up the login.asp page and click on Log In. Enter your details in the resulting data entry page and submit the form. You'll receive the confirmation that the cookie has been written to your machine.
Next, go back to the login page and refresh it (or close down your browser, restart, and open up the login page again). When you click on Log In this time, you'll be shown the details stored about you in the visitors.mdb database. ASP has interrogated the cookie on your PC, recognized you, and found your details in the database. This is only a very basic application, but it gives you some idea about the ability of ASP to interact with the user, VBScript, DLLs and databases.
If you want to explore the ins and outs of ASP and databases in more detail, there are two other Wrox books that might interest you:
Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0 (ISBN 1-861001-34-7)
Professional Active Server Pages 2.0 (ISBN 1-861001-26-6)
As you've probably gathered, all we've done here is scratch the surface of what ASP is capable of in conjunction with databases. But the client/server principle and the use of ADO within the ASP scripts are a powerful demonstration of how simple the baseline interactions can be.