Customer Reviews

Active Server Pages 3.0 by Example

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although HTML is the language of the world wide web, the real action is carried out by code that resides on the server. The life and death operations of a business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) e-business are the web pages created on the server by programs that accept data from the client and interact with server-side databases. One of the most widely used technologies is the Active Server Pages (ASP) technology created by Microsoft. Naturally, given its paternal origins, the scripting language used throughout is VBScript, the pared down version of Visual Basic.
This is one of those books where the promises made by the title are kept. The topics are all presented by examples of working code, which in most cases is understandable and effectively carries out the operations to be demonstrated. The initial two chapters are introductions to the ASP model and the VBScript programming language. By necessity brief and somewhat incomplete, the treatment of the ASP model is adequate although the reader with no experience in VBScript will probably have to consult other resources.
The middle chapters are used to present the basics of how ASP files run on the server and how communication with the client pages is accomplished. This is as good an introduction of this critical matter as I have seen. Topics covered include the global.asa file, the ActiveX Data Object (ADO), cookies, SQL connection and recordset objects; ad rotators and counters; and how to use installable components.
The later chapters are devoted to the creation of a more elaborate site designed to implement an online educational institution. This involves the creation and updating of address books, a login page with security that prevents unauthorized access and sending e-mail messages among other things. Interacting with databases using SQL commands forms an integral part of the site. While not a complete model for all things one could or would do on an e-commerce site, it is complete enough so that you can learn what is necessary to understand the structure of such sites.
ASP is not the only technology used to dynamically create web pages, the effectiveness of which makes or breaks any e-business site. However, it is currently the most popular and should be learned by anyone with a serious interest in commerce on the web. This book is a valuable and effective tool in learning those critical lessons.

Being a beginner with ASP I bought this book as a tutorial to learn ASP. I have access to ASP professional Developers so I was able to ask a lot of questions in learning ASP. The code and explainations that are in the book are not clear and are hard to understand. I had to ask many questions. The code seemed to be hard to follow. The Developers that I have access to felt that the Author used too many 'functions' when they were not needed (this made the code hard to follow.) I am going to have to buy another book to learn from. This book may be good for refrence, but not learning from.

Regardless of how good the text in any programming book is, the book is pretty much useless if there is not adequate support for the code - particularly in a "By Example" book - which this book purports to be. The book contains no CD to test your code against the authors. Well, that would be OK if there were the support files online - like Wrox has; but NO. No supporting code anywhere. And don't be fooled by the "Where to find the Code" heading in the Introduction - it just points you to sample code for a single chapter. I encountered "internal server error HTTP: 500" in one of the exercises, and wanted to test my code to what the author had written. No such luck. Was it me? Maybe. Was it the code in the book? I'll never know... Buy "Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0" published by Wrox. They know how to support their products. As for this publisher, they don't have a QUE.

In terms of adding to the reviews so far, I would say that Reselman does a good job of introducing real-life programming issues in context. He walks you through those 'gotchas' that you will encounter.

No surprise that the book has no javascript examples to speak of, focusing on vbscript. That's good at the intro level -- you've got enough to learn about without having javascript syntax problems all the time. I agree that it's a good reference, but because the examples are concrete (one is called 'using ASP to add a record to an ODBC datasource'). If you use this stuff much, you'll want to use functions a lot -- hopefully you might be able to reuse some code -- so I wouldn't put too much credence in the low review).

In terms of prerequisites, I would think it useful to have some general SQL knowledge ("sql for dummies" is a great add-on -- you'll be using SQL for all data access, so getting it down is key), and some basic HTML as well. Other than that, I found it very straight-forward.

Cheers!

Excelent book for beginner to learn ASP. A lot of grahpics and figures in it help you to grasp the structure of ASP code.

Read a good tech-book is enjoyable.
This book will save your time and money, because this the book everyone can understand, and there are lot of meal in it. The author was thinking while writing the book. He is the master for making the reader to understand what he is talking about.
The most I like is there are a lot of graphics and figure in the book to illustrate structure of ASP and programming code. One piucture worths a ton of words! -- It should be a standard in tech-book.

Thanks the author!

author try to explain the material with examples.that is what reader wants.good book for beginers.worth for its price.

The book had numerous code examples, as implied by the title. Specifically, I understood and was able to easily implement the Server.Execute method in my own application thanks to Listing 10.7 on Page 250. Thanks, Mr. Reselman!

I am very pleased with this purchase. Although I have passed the InterDev exam, I never really understood a lot of it until I read Reselman's book. He really has a knack of explaining complex concepts. The book starts off quite basic, but by the end you have built a quite useful interactive web site. All the source code is on-line and so far it all seems to work fine. At a manageable 575 pages, it only half the size of some of the big ASP tomes, but then it is only about half the price.

Good book, good samples and good programming techniques, The author is very clear and the concept is explained very nicely, he just fails short in the implementation of the component in the ASP pages, he explained very good but the componet was already prepare for that tutorial, I would like the author develop the component throught the tutorial and then implemented, at last that is the way it is!!! , as a web developer I am interested to in the creation of the COM, but I gues that is a diferent subject from the point of view of the author. A very understandable book.