Review

Dates, times, bytes, and arrays are used less often, but are important types of data in VBScript. Although you may not have an immediate need for them in your administrative scripts, keep them in mind. When you do run into them in the future, or when you see them in the example scripts I'll present throughout this book, you can refer back to this chapter to learn more about them or to refresh your memory.

Bytes, dates, and times use conversion and manipulation functions very similar to those you've learned to use with string and numeric data. Date and time data can also be used with the unique calculation functions DateAdd() and DateDiff(). Arrays, however, aren't really a data type at all; they're a way to collect multiple values into a single variable. Arrays can be strings, numbers, dates, times, or bytes. You can create and manipulate arrays with functions like Join(), Split(), and ReDim.

COMING UP

Now it's time to add some intelligence to your scripts, teaching them how to react to changing conditions and to change their behavior based on your input. In the next chapter, I'll introduce you to control-of-flow statements and constructs, and, you'll be nearly finished with your VBScript tutorial. After a quick overview of the built-in scripting objects and the file system objects, I'll show you how to pull everything together in your first script.