Customer Reviews

Beginning ASP Databases

5 star:		(98)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The missing link for ASP web developers who are ready for databases connectivity. You do not need to know ASP to benefit from this book. I did not. Using a simple format the author takes you from basic ASP installation, to building HTML forms which add, delete, and update information on your local DB server. Every word in the book is carefully worded so you never second guess the author's intentions. Things to note: The book's database and scripting focus is Access and VBscript. But It is easy to create the example DB tables in SQL Server - that's what I did. Download a single file from the WROX website and all of the working examples in the book are at your disposal. You don't waste any time figuring out coding problems, Instead your main focus is reviewing the code and analyzing how it worked so well. This book is better than any $1500 ASP training course. It is the single Web development resource which connects all of the pieces together for you. Thanks John!

This book is a great introduction to accessing databases using ASP. Data access is via ADO, and both Jet (MS Access) and SQL Server database examples are provided. In addition to just showing how to connect to a database through ASP, the book also shows many practical examples of when and why you would want to do so, and also provides a good case study illustrating an entire web application including such features as user logins, basic security, and cookies (as well as of course plenty of database access through ADO and dynamic asp pages).

This book would be a good first book for a programmer wanting to learn ASP and ASP Database technology, as complete code samples and explanations are provided for all asp code given, but it is also a good follow up book to Beginning ASP (ver 3.0 is about to be released)

(I was a member of the technical review team for this book, so I have read every word of the book and run every code sample.)

If you aren't familiar with Wrox Publishing (great books!), Wrox has a learning tree on the back of most of their books. It helps developers determine the appropriate path and books to read to learn a specific technology. As a developer, I can't stress the importance of this enough. I therefore feel it's important to suggest that while this is a Beginning ASP book, you should have some experience coding straight Active Server Pages (no database stuff) and if you like Wrox, I highly suggest Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0 or 3.0 (I reviewed 2.0 if you need help determining which version book to get). If I hadn't gone through Beginning ASP 2.0 before doing this book, I wouldn't have gotten as much out of it. This is because the author immediately dives in to ADO in Chapter 3, assuming you are ASP-ready!

Having said that, this is a great book. I was familiar with Microsoft data access techniques (ADO, Jet, SQL language) and a little with ASP but I really needed a book to see how they all tied together. The author goes through SQL as does most any database book, but at least he uses it in the context of integrating with your ASP web pages. A great part of this book is showing how you would actually implement recordsets. In other words, he doesn't say "Here's how to bring back recordsets", he says "Here's how to bring back recordsets and display the information usefully in an ASP page". Cookies, Errors, Stored Procedures, and a full case study are all presented in later chapters. The case study was extremely helpful.

One other thing I think you may find helpful-- don't feel left out if you are only developing on a workstation with no server right now. You can still use this book. Chapter 2 is dedicated solely to showing how you can work with this entire book using/installing Personal Web Server, IIS, ADO on any Microsoft operating system, including Windows 95/98, 2000, Or NT with no server involved.

I have been designing web pages for years and never really saw the point of using "Programming" in them for my purposes. I kew a bit of VB, so I just skipped the Begining ASP book and dove into this one. I spent about 40 hours with this book and used it cover to cover. I have never done that with a technical book before. The fact that John is a teacher is very evident in this book. There are very few mistakes and the structure is incredibly easy to follow.

I followed all the examples and hand coded most everything rather than just using the prewritten code from the Wrox Site. I learned so much from the book that I couldn't help but to totally change my design methodology. Now when I am writing for an IIS server, I always use ASP. Databases are now integrated into almost all of my work. It's given me a completly new creative outlet.

John has focused on good design practices while he explained the details of connecting to the databases and the methods of interacting with them. I didn't fully digest all of the methods of connecting with ADO, but I just applied his methods to similar work, and it all comes out nicely.

This book focuses strongly on Access, but most of the scripting can be adapted to SQL server easily. All of the Server Side Scripting is done in VBScript and any Client Side is done in Javascript primarily for form validation. That's the standard method for most people, and it's not really confusing when you see it.

You don't need to know ASP before using this book, but it would be helpful to have a good ASP reference available to you. I ran into a few situations where I wanted to do something a bit diferent from the book, and I got stuck becuase I didn't know the syntax for a command I wanted to use. I borrowed a co-worker's "Beginning ASP" a few times, but probably would have been better served with an something which had an index of commands. After reading this book, I immediately set out to do a fully database driven site for my company and they love it. I could easily take a job as a Web "Developer" now.

If you are doing anything complex from an IIS server, whether it's maintaining records, using search capabilities, or just managing a large site, I highly reccomend this book. And ASP in general is very useful if only for the server side includes that can make your site so much easier to maintain.

Let me put my review in perspective. I have been programming in one language or another for over twenty years. I was the project manager for a Fortune 500 company's e-commerce initiative. I do some consulting on the side. In other words, I consider myself to be a veteran programmer.

As you know by now, most programming books fall into one of two categories: expert references, or trivial introductions. Wrox books fall somewhere in between. As a result, these books usually create some controversy over who should read them. I find them to be exactly what I need, and interesting enough to read from cover to cover.

"Beginning ASP Databases" is nearly three years old at the time of this review, an absolute eternity in "Internet time." This book still provides an excellent foundation for novice-to-intermediate ASP programmers, especially those people who don't yet have access to Visual Studio .NET. It can even surprise the self-proclaimed "experts" every now and then.

Despite the word "Beginning" in the title, the author presumes that the reader is familiar with HTML, ASP, as well as relational databases (RDBMS's). These assumptions are spelled out in the Introduction. Many people may choose to overlook this seemingly unimportant section, but Wrox does a good job of positioning their books here. You owe it to your pocketbook to read it first, if you can.

Mr. Kauffman is a college professor, and the content of this book has been refined by his teaching the subject matter numerous times. His writing style is relaxed and easy to read. Along the way, he includes descriptions of those errors that are the most commonly-made by his students. I smiled to myself several times, knowing that I had made many of them, too. Each chapter includes exercises to support the text, and a quiz at the end. The answers are provided at the end of each chapter, which is a welcome feature compared to some of those college texts I read that just beat me up without letting me know if I was right or wrong.

The author briefly mentions competing technologies, such as ColdFusion and PHP. He talks about third-party programs such as Chili!ASP that allow Active Server Pages to run on Apache Web servers, hosted on UNIX platforms. This global perspective was a welcome surprise, as most Wrox books are Microsoft-centric to a fault.

The book shows its age when it comes to describing the installation of an ASP development environment under Windows NT Server, Windows 2000 Workstation/Server, as well as Personal Web Server on Windows 95/98. I will add that you can develop on Peer Web Services on Windows NT Workstation, as well as IIS 5.0 on Windows XP Professional. You won't be able to install PWS on Windows ME without first installing it on Windows 98 and suffering through an ugly upgrade, and I haven't tried Windows XP Home Edition. Contrary to what other reviewers have stated, ODBC is available in Windows XP, under the Control Panel's "Administrative Tools" applet.

The author acknowledges that OLE DB is the more efficient provider to use. Aside from one example in Chapter Six, most of the code uses an ODBC connection. If you prefer to work with the native OLE DB provider, you can make suitable changes to each page, and everything will still work. I believe that using a system DSN is easier, and therefore is more appropriate for a "Beginning" title such as this one.

Although I've worked with ADO recordsets seemingly thousands of times, I still appreciated the refresher. I especially needed to revisit the importance of cursors, and how they can affect a recordset's behavior. The "heavy lift" chapter of the book explains how to create HTML forms that add, modify, and delete data from a database. This functionality lies at the heart of Web-enabling a database. Even though I have coded my own pages to perform these tasks, I still benefited from reading someone else's approach.

The book goes on to cover client-side cookies, when they can be helpful, and how to set them from server-side code. If you have encountered difficulty finding this information concisely explained in one location, then look no further.

I believe that the quality of an application can be determined by the robustness of its error handling. Mr. Kauffman discusses the Error collection specifically, in addition to his advisory warnings and troubleshooting tips within each chapter. This information is invaluable to any new developer. More attention could have been paid to making error handling more portable by creating reusable functions, instead of coding it into each individual page.

Stored Procedures are very interesting, as their judicious use can definitely improve the performance of a Web application. Every book that covers parameterized stored procedures always recommends creating the ADO objects in this order: Connection, Command, and then Parameter. This book is no exception. I prefer to build my Command object first, and then append the parameters before creating the connection. If the user has provided data of the wrong type, then I don't have to expend the valuable server resources to create a connection to the database.

The last two sections cover more tips that the author learned from the school of hard knocks, as well as performance testing suggestions. Although some of the utilities that are mentioned are dated, the remainder of the information is still valuable for a developer of any experience.

"Beginning ASP Databases" turns out to be an excellent resource that covers most of the functionality that is required to web-enable a database. It does not cover security, which is an aspect of database and application development that should always be kept in mind. Most of my criticisms center around my desire for additional information on topics that are rightly reserved for a "Professional" book. These objections aside, it is a ready asset to those who are new to Active Server Pages, and also provides many helpful suggestions to seasoned veterans.

I went from having zero knowledge about accessing databases using asp and VBscript to being able to customize my website with professionaly functioning web pages in a matter of 2 weeks. The book walks you through step by step instructions and examples quite like a professor would teach a class. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in learning this subject.

Firstly, let me say that this is a great book. It provides some great information on how ASP can be used for database applications, covering the basics such as recordsets, connections and commands. There are also a lot of examples in the book all set out in a very logical way: Here is what we want to do, Here's how to do it, now review what we have done and why.

That said, bare in mind that the title of the book EXACTLY describes what the book does. Do not buy this book if you want to learn about ASP in general, perhaps with a focus on databases, because this book does take for granted that you have a reasonable knowledge of the ASP language. A lot of concepts such as session and application variables and others are not covered, refering these to other Wrox books. Also note that this is the "Beginning" book and perhaps there will be a book titled "Completing ASP Databases" because this book does not cover it all- data security, encryption and other concepts which are also important, especially when your application is destined for the World Wide Web, are not covered here.

That in mind I guarentee that this book will help anyone planning on using ASP to put data on the web - Perhaps I expected a little more depth for my money.

I decided to write my review, although I have not completed reading the whole book, because I am convinced more people should know about this book!

It does fill the void left among the numerous ASP programming book with two major advantages - 1. It completely answers what the title of the book would have you expect - beginning ASP database programming; 2 - It does it in the most appropriate way - with very professional teaching style which still leaves the student dignity intact.

One little remark - The author overall assumes that certain tasks (particularly the database security types) can be consulted with a DBA, and in my case, in the company I work for, there is no DBA . I believe the book would have benefited from having an appendix on the differences between NT vs. NT/SQL Server mixed type of security, but other than this, the book is just perfect!

Finally, my sincere thank you to John Kauffman and Wrox for a very practical, extremely well written book which comes just in time to answer my professional prayers!

I've been looking for a good book on web database programming, but since now have had to settle on learning from others and my own mistakes. This is a great book to help you get a jumpstart on creating interactive web databases! It focuses mostly on Access, but it also explains SQL Server at the same time.

As an advanced ASP developer and an intermediate web database programmer, just by reading the first 6 chapters the first day I got it, I can already see how this will save you alot of time as it points out common mistakes, while also suggesting optimization techniques. I also like the thorough explanation he gives throughout his examples.

If you have signed up for an ASP database class, drop it and buy this book. Kauffman has structured this book just like a class room environment. He shows you how to write the code that you will use in the work force, explains the code in detail, has you work on projects (with answers given), and then continues to build upon previous topics. This book will never have dust on it!