Customer Reviews

Active Server Pages 3.0 From Scratch

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

As a professional technician and HTML guru, I appreciate a book that can take me from the humble beginnings of an electronic concept to the frenzied mastery of that subject. There are many good books out there on the subject of ASP. Unfortunately, this isn't one of them. The lesson plans are solid, but WHOEVER proofed this book for typos in the code should be FIRED! If I wasn't already familiar with VBScripting, I'd still be sitting at my desk wondering what I was doing wrong...

Active Server Pages 3.0 from Scratch sets itself apart from a myriad of other ASP books by assuming very little about the readers previous experience or knowledge. When I picked up the book, I was a complete novice who had never even hand coded a page in HTML. One month later, I have a good understanding of the applications introduced in the book, and a basic understanding of ASP that is enabling me to develop my own ASP applications. There are and handful of errors in the book that have to be worked out, but the process of doing so cemented my understanding of the whole process.

The intent of this book is to teach ASP by going through the steps of building a complex website, but it falls a little short in its goal. First of all there are many editing errors which can be frustrating when you don't catch them. The examples tend to get complicated pretty quick and it would be hard for readers new to ASP to catch on. The author seems to tell you what to do instead of showing you how and why you are doing it. One plus about the book are the many different aspects of ASP that it does cover, from database integration to setting up secure order forms, even touching on XML and SQL. This book is one of those to buy at your own risk, if you already know a some ASP and dont mind some editing errors then its a good deal, otherwise keep looking.

I haven't read any good example book since the original core java book. This is a good starting book for learning ASP. Although there are many typos, but it's still a good book. I took few of the examples from the book, modified a bit, and incorporated into our company web site. It servers the purpose well.

While this book has a sound approach to teaching the basics of ASP it has too many syntactic errors in it's examples for most beginning programmers.

An excellent and productive beginning!

With all the anti-Microsoft sentiment flying around these days, few of us appreciate and understand the joke. Make it simple, dummy! It is easy to make it hard, but very difficult to make things simple. And, in the world of simplicity, NT is above UNIX, ASP is above pearl or JSP.

In line with the 'keep it simple!' philosopy(which actually makes your rich as well), is Nicholas Chase. His book, Active Server Pages 3.0 from scratch, has allowed me to be productive in interacting with my web server and databases within days. If you are interested in being productive very fast, Nick's book is the one. People don't have the time for cryptic codes and gigantic books, they have business to run. This book will definitly allow you to do just that.

The pen is surely mightier than the sword!

I personally love "by example" books and this book is certainly that. What better way to learn than having ASP concepts explained in the context of an actual web-site? Nicholas Chase has done an excellent job in defining what you are going to do, explaining how to do it, and then stepping you through the explanation. It's a perfect starting point for learning ASP and VBScript.

Well my title pretty much says it all, you definetely need some knowledge of asp ahead of time before going into this book. I say that not because of the examples, but the typos and the author not really giving clear direction at times. There are certain components the author suggests that will not work and will drive you crazy, the reason they dont work (and the author never mentions) is because you need to install some other parts to use them. But if you know a little about ASP then it wont be too frustrating, all in all if you want to learn more about asp and developing fairly complex applications this is good at making it a quick learn.

This book certainly is not for novice reader. However, this book covers some areas which will certainly be very helpful to beginners as well as intermediate level database developers. There are very good examples in this book which can be used in a variety of ways. I was really impressed with chapters 5 and 7. Not very many books show such examples. For example, in chapter 7, it shows you how to update multiple records (updating quantity in a shopping cart) by using very simple sql statements. Certainly there are some typos in this book. Personally, if I want to test something, I like to type the codes myself rather than using codes from the CDs. This way I can ignore the codes which will not serve my purpose. Overall, this is a very good book for asp database developers.

ASP is not as simple as HTML. Speaking from experience, I can say learning ASP can be frustrating. For example, not all web hosting sites will support ASP. Still, in my experience, ASP from Scratch does a good job introducing the beginner to the subject. Before devoting too much time to ASP development, it would be prudent to ask the hosting service how their servers handle interactive programming. Once you know for certain AS Pages are supported you can get started in earnest and "ASP from Scratch" is a good tool to start with. To use this book, you should have a familiarity with HTML. Nicholas Chase walks the reader through the interactivity of ASP from simple to complex very well. The book is well organized and his writing is clear and understandable. Still, due to security and other issues, a web hosting site may require a programmer to use some site specific syntax. Again, a few good questions to the web host's technical support people will serve the reader well. Overall, I can recommend this book to any serious ASP programmer. There are a few typos that the author has corrected and posted at his web site. There aren't many, but a few minutes to insert these corrections before you get started will make your use of the book easier. If you take the time to read and study Mr. Chase's work, you'll learn a lot about ASP's. I have. RJones