The most common way to create dynamic content is to use CGI - the web server executes a program which generates HTML page as output. The information is encoded according to the CGI protocol and needs to be decoded. There are common libraries for Perl, C, etc. for handling CGI input. The documentation for the standard Perl 5 CGI module is here . Also, the scripts must have executable permissions for the web server - after you uploaded the scripts, telnet to your web server with your username and password, and change the permissions with the command 'chmod 755 filename'.
Some ftp programs support changing permissions as well.
Most CGIs are written in interpreted languages and don't need to be compiled. On NT web servers you need to compile WIN32 executables at home and upload them. Some web servers support extensions which can interpret scripting langages embeded in the HTML code. For example the Microsoft IIS NT web server supports Active Server Pages with embedded Visual Basic, Internet Data Connector scripts with embedded SQL, etc. Click here for documentation on other scripting - IDC, databases, CGI, etc.