Customer Reviews

ASP in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference, Second Edition

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Keep in mind that this, and all "....in a Nutshell" books are designed to be reference material, not how to books. From that standpoint, this is an excellant desk reference for any ASP developer. After using another book to ease into ASP, this one became my standby for day to day development. If you are looking for something to teach you ASP, look elsewhere and then buy this one when you're done.

Though I use this book sometimes for reference i really must i did not need this book. I guess i am more advanced in ASP than i knew. This book is not a guide for beginners but for someone intermediate who wants to explore more of the features of ASP. There are many things i've learned from the book, which i didn't know was possible before. It's a very good reference book, but it is not a tutorial or anything like that, so if you are a beginner and need a guide to asp then do not buy this book. The only bad thing about it is that it should have covered more of using databases and sql with asp. I would recommend this book for someone who are intermediate asp-developers or someone in the middle between beginner and intermediate and want to take the next step.

This book is a reference. All it does it quickly mention all classes, objects and properties and explain what they do. This way some fundamental explanation is left out (while some trivial information has been copy-pasted dozens of times). As I am a professional VB and VBA programmer, I figured ASP wouldn't be too hard with a reference manual. Yet I failed to get "the big picture" with this book. I reckon it'll be a good reference for those that already have another ASP book...

I purchased this book to be both an introduction to ASP as well as a reference guide. I was not disappointed in either. For an introduction, the book is definitely geared more as a reference guide, so it assumes you have some scripting (or programming) background; VBS and/or VB being an advantage. Having both of these, I was very pleased to find that the sections of the book used as an introduction/mini-tutorial kept to the important information and did not stray off into personal stories or lengthy (yet ultimately pointless) explanations.

As a reference guide, I use it constantly. It is one of the few books that actually reside on my desk. The reference sections are divided into logical sections, and clearly give syntax, rules, explanations and (when appropriate) examples. The reference section even goes so far as to cover ADO; I found some did not, or if they did, they skimmed it. This reference guide provides excellent ADO references.

This guide has allowed me to jump very confidently into ASP scripting, and has yet to let me down. I have recommended this book to my peers, and I recommend it to you.

I initially purchased this book because I had to do some database integration work with a product that was ASP-based. I hadn't used ASP before, but assumed it would be like any other programming language. My experience with Nutshell books is that they provide good summaries for this sort of thing, and "ASP in a Nutshell" is no exception.

Most of the methods are shown with short examples -- which is great. Unfortunately, not all of the options to the methods are supported, even on MSFT-based environments, which I assume would be the dominant consumers of ASP. It would have been beneficial to indicate these a little more explicitly.

The book gives a good overview of the Response, Request, and Session objects. It makes an earnest attempt to cover Active Data Objects (ADO), however, as the author concedes, a thorough exploration of that is another book entirely. This is unfortunate because the primary reason people use ASP is to connect to a back-end database.

There is a reference to another, forthcoming book, "ADO: The Definitive Guide," by Jason T. Roff, which purports to cover these "advanced" topics. Although a "ASP in a Nutshell" is a competent reference, the Roff book (when published) may have been a better solution for my particular needs.

I recently made a successful transition from client server to web applications. I credit part of the success to this book. As a VB programmer, I wasn't interested in a long book on all aspects of the VBScript language and COM objects. What I needed was a book that explained the HTTP protocol and ASP object models. This book filled that function exactly.

This is not a good book for programming novices, and will be no more helpful than a reference manual would be to them. However, experienced VB programmers will see it as fulfilling both instructional and reference roles. It is a book you will read on repeated occasions and always keep close at hand.

Like many programmers, I find the O'Reilly books to be invaluable and far above the average quality of books in this field. However, ASP In a Nutshell is a major disappointment. It is hard to use, missing information, and poorly formatted. I'd think twice about getting *any* title in the "Nutshell" series now.

I bought the book because I find long books on ASP so tedious. ASP is, after all, fairly simple stuff, so I was looking for a book to concisely present some "best-practice" techniques and reference material. Though this book is mainly a breakdown of the ASP objects (and other common objects used with ASP), it really gives no practical information about how to use these objects. (This was a serious hindrance to me when a project I was on was limited to MDAC 2.1.) And, they've arbitrarily skipped important properties and methods (like the BeginTrans method of ADO). You might expect an ASP reference to cover VBScript, at least a brief description of its syntax and reserved words, but none of that is presented here.

Furthermore, a lot of space is wasted by giving a complete ASP page as an example of every property and method they do cover, when just a few lines would do, giving them more space to discuss the way objects work together. Finally, the formatting is so plain it makes information hard to find and read.

In short: as a reference, it has major holes, and as a concise guide to ASP, it falls far short. The title is deceptive to say the least.

I'm a bit disappointed by this book. To use it as a reference, it is too incomplete, some methods just aren't explained. A reference of VBScript is also missing and overall there is little information to get the big picture of how asp works. So as a beginner you will miss basic informations about ASP, as advanced programmer you will get angry when you find out that exactly the function you want to look up isn't there.

Be warned, if like I did, you think that this is the only book you'll need to be able to build ASP scripts; you're very much mistaken. Whenever I recommend this book, I always recommend it alongside VBScript in a Nutshell as you really need knowledge of an ASP supported scripting language before you can use ASP in a Nutshell to it's full potential!

This is yet another reference book that I've owned both editions of because I thought it was useful enough to update; but then, my site is developed using ASP, so I'm probably biased in this respect. Ok, so I got the 1st Edition late on in the game and was a little reluctant to part with cash for the new edition - but as IIS 5 started to become standard for Windows hosting, and I had access to it after getting Windows XP Pro... I thought it was about time I updated it.

ASP in a Nutshell is my first point of reference when I'm looking up the properties of a particular ASP object. I've also found it an invaluable guide for connecting and manipulating ASP scripts that used ADO for data storage and manipulation. For a while it was the only book I owned that covered the issue of connecting ASP scripts to databases.

Most of the installable components I'd never heard of before getting the book, just as well really because few are of much use - even if they aren't available on your system, a lot can be easily reproduced. The areas I find myself most frequently refering to are the main set of ASP objects, the FileSystem Object and the ActiveX Data Objects. These go into enough detail to keep all but the experienced programmers happy.

For those new to the Windows scene, there is a brief but detailed guide to setting up ASP to work with your IIS server; but it's hardly rocket science since a clean install of IIS will set up most (if not all) of what you need anyway! If you use ASP regularly, or you intend to, then ASP in a Nutshell should be on your desktop... but please remember it won't fulfill all your ASP development needs without another book to fill in the language gaps. What book you choose to accompany it depends on your language and experience... I personally like VBScript in a Nutshell.

I'm not sure I can add much to the other reviews here, other than to state that the book is only partially updated for IIS 5.0 (Windows 2000) in my opinion. Nearly 30 pages are devoted to coverage of CDONTS, none of which will operate on any out-of-the-box Windows 2000-based web server I know of.

There is zero coverage of CDO for Windows 2000 (a/k/a CDOSYS), which is considerably more powerful and flexible than CDONTS, and in my opinion, represents the "right" way to do things for any new code (even if CDONTS is available on *your* Windows 2000 Server).

Otherwise, this book is rapidly becoming my favorite ASP reference -- one that's a lot handier than pulling-up the MSDN Library web site every time I forget a property name or method syntax (which is a lot more often than I care to admit in public).