Customer Reviews

Active Server Pages 3.0: Your visual blueprint for developing interactive Web sites

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The great advantage to this book is that it's concise. I am a web professional, and I was looking for a book that would help me get up to speed quickly with ASPs. By following the examples, I was able to complete basic tasks, including retrieving data from forms, reading files, and accessing databases. It is clearly organized, and it was easy for me to skip around to the topics that interested me.

The main drawback of this book for me is that I will probably need another book to help me with more advanced topics. Also, it tends to rely on the examples to teach the reader so if you're looking for a more general explanation of ASP objects and architecture, look elsewhere. Finally, the first 100 pages were a waste for me because I was already familiar with Visual Basic and HTML. The book could also use a larger reference section. Still, I give the book 4 stars because for the target audience of beginning ASP designers I think it's an affordable, effective solution.

In short, I would recommend this to a beginner who wants to learn the basics of ASPs quickly, and doesn't want to do much reading.

I recommend this book if you are new to ASP and web development. It is a great overview of ASP and its related topics. Each concept is illustrated with short example code, along with extra info about the concept. I found it very clearly written and easy to understand. This is a lot like a "dummys" book. This book assumes very little prior knowledge of programming or even things like HTML forms. It's a great introduction and reference for beginners.

What this book won't give you is very much context. It will give you a lot of tools, but not tell you how to put them together into a real project. You will probably want to use this book as a supplement to a more in-depth book like Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0 by Wrox Publishers. These two books actually complement each other. Where the Wrox book gives tons of information, this book gives the main points with no extra fluff.

I am new to web development, and I am not a very experienced programmer. I learned a lot from this book. It even includes how to set up your Windows 2000 web server and how to make an ActiveX component in Visual Basic. I found a lot of helpful tips (for example, did you know that pressing Ctrl while clicking the refresh button in IE will cause a 100% refresh?) A handy brief VBscript reference is also included.

If you are an experienced programmer or web developer, you will want more than this book gives you.

This book is very flawed. It is more likely to confuse a beginner than enlighten them.

The first major flaw: No real 'big picture' of the topic is offered. The book consists of small superficial sections, one devoted to each element of ASP. The problem is that each element is not satisfactorally placed in a context.

But worst of all is the books 'visual' approach, supposedly helpful. Why on earth would a reader need to be told to press tab to indent a piece of text, each and every time it is required? This overkill of step by step visual explanation becomes absurd.

Check it out before you buy it.

I have looked at many how-to developer books on ASP, Javascript, VB, etc.. and for those of us artists, right-brainers, beginners; those of us who didn't gravitate to writing BASIC in 4th or 5th grade, IDG's Visual series is THE series. Maran Graphics out if Toronto (I think) did a tremendous job putting together a consistent, highly VISUAL step-by-step layout that doesn't compromise content for 'cute-sie'.

I just returned a 2-book set (something like ASP and Visual Interdev in 24 hours. It was one of the ". . .in 24 hours" books. DON'T LET IT'S POPULARITY FOOL YOU. IT WAS THE WORST BOOK OF ITS KIND THAT I'VE BOUGHT IN YEARS.

Yes, maybe for the naturals who don't need screen shots to 'get it', this series won't work, but for the rest of us, IDG's Visuals are the only way to go.

Excellent book. I built an ASP site within a week of opening this book up. The pictures included in the book really do help you learn very fast. Don't expect the book to go into detail on the more complicated parts of ASP though. I wished the database section of the book was a little bit longer but not a big problem because the internet has so many resources on that part.

This book is good for beginners, but may not be right for the prof. level programmers because this book mainly discussed the general, and basic knowledge about ASP. Overall, it is a good tool book.

Moreover, the graphical contents and detailed instructions do help a beginner understand ASP faster.

Pros:
- short and sweet 'guidebook'
- beginner (maybe intermediate) level
- just about every page has a different ASP topic
- brief code examples, specific to the topic discussed on that page

Cons:
- e-book is actually 16 individual .pdf files, one for each chapter (can't search a topic unless you know what chapter it was from)
- no in-depth code examples

Summary:
- good reference book that shows just about everything you can do using ASP
- need to supplement with more in-depth examples

I bought this book hoping to learn the basics of ASP. Well, I sure did learn the basics! I already have experince with HTML, java, cgi, perl, and visual basic. So I already know the basics of programing. The way this book is divided up, is by ASP subjects, and really did not show how to integrate them into a finished web project that really had a use. Unfortently, I may still have to buy another ASP book to fully understand ASP. I would recomend this book to anyone who does not have ANY programing experience at all. But too elementary for myself.

I liked the layout of the book, but it's way too simple for anyone that's already had to deal with ASP. I've been using ASP for a few years now and thought maybe this might contain some nuggets of info that I'd overlooked. Well, it didn't.

If you're new to ASP, I'd recommend it pretty highly. The way the book is layed out with blow-by-blow details is superb. If only there were DCOM books like this..

I read the whole book in just over 2 hours, and that may be because I've already used ASP on IIS4 (ASP 2.0), but mostly because it covers way to many subjects that even though "related" to ASP should not make part of a book with this title. The author (the author is a family business as a group) should have included... an introduction, yes, a pointer to other sources, well ok, but not a whole 1/3 of a book!

I was shocked by the layout because it made me feel like a was back in middle school. Pages with "blue print" graphics in the corners and TWO screenshots per page in EVERY page! This was a little bit too much.

I give it 4 starts because I think that regardless of how useful or not the book was for me, it would make a great intro book to someone who has done NO programming before, and wants to pick up ASP. You'll learn, yes you certainly will, this I guarantee. And because of that it is a GREAT value!

You will not only learn about ASP but also about IIS, VBScript, SQL and DSN, all at a intro level, but done amazingly well, simple yet not superficial. Of course ADO and some old and new Components are introduced in a manner that is brief yet elegantly and clearly explained.

If you are looking for more "undocumented" information and/or new features of ASP 3.0 and its applications, please look elsewhere.

This book was very hard to "judge" since it is a great book from the beginners point of view and for such purpose the layout is perhaps appropriate, but it is deceiving as an ASP 3.0 book for which you must not fall if you've done ANY ASP in the past, even if it was a one pager!