Customer Reviews

Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0

5 star:		(73)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An excellent book for beginners, Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0 starts simply and builds on what you've learned until you code a fairly fully-featured application. By the time you've gone through the book, you'll be able to create web pages that can return and capture information stored in databases, tailor pages based on information captured from input by users -- in short, create web pages that are in fact active.

Although there are some grammatical errors in the text itself, I think another reviewer perhaps overstated their existence. More importantly though, the examples and exercises take you through using the materials covered in a clear, concise manner. Not a lot of fluff or worthless repetition.

Although geared towards Windows 2000, the book can be used if you have a Windows 95/98 platform, at least as far as learning ASP basic coding techniques. An appendix covers use of Personal Web Server (required to let your 95/98 based PC act as a server and thus run the ASP code).

Numerous other appendices provide worthwhile reference materials concerning errors, VBScript reference, runtime libraries. etc.

If you are looking to teach yourself ASP, this is an excellent book to use to achieve that end. Don't let its size (1100+ pages) turn you away.

In two days...in two days I was writing my own ASP pages ! This book covers the basics in a format that is comprehensive and easy to follow. You think you are just learning asp...but what you don't realize is you are aslo learning VBScript! The book is written in such a way that you are literally "forced" to remember what you just read. Packed with explanations and examples and explanations of those examples, this book takes you by the hand and builds on what you learn page by page. Forget the other guys...this book teaches you what you need to know. Definitely one of the best "investments" made into my future !

Like most Wrox books I've read, this book contains lots of easily understandable information, but it is not as concise as it could be. Still, I learned to use ASP from this book and I recommend it.

I have done a little Visual Basic and HTML coding, and to me this book seemed too basic in parts. The first part of the book is about how the server deals with HTML and about VBscript. The book doesn't really get into ASP until about page 170.

The examples are usually short, which is good. Too bad the examples are not more self-contained. The authors too often illustrate a new point by saying "use the code in the previous example, but with the following changes..." That's just lazy. A complete new code listing for each new topic would have been more helpful.

If you are a beginner and you don't mind wading through a lot of words (1000+ pages worth) and a somewhat boring book design, get this book. It will teach you a lot.

If you are a very experienced developer, this book will be too basic - look elsewhere (the Wrox book Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 seems popular with reviewers on Amazon).

This is one of the best beginning books that I have ever read. I am a big fan of Wrox Press and Oreiley books, and this is clearly the book to use if you want to begin ASP pages. The book starts off for someone who has no programming experience at all but very quickly jumps into complicated subjects such as cookies, server access, databases, etc...

The use of actual screen shots of what the code looks like in a window is a huge help. The chapter that serves as a sample application has helped me write more than 20 different applicationd already. Once you have mastered this book then I also recommend Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 as a reference book. Combined you will be an ASP Wiz.

The book also touches on topics like COM and XML, so if you want to get your feet wet, then they are useful features as well, but not really what the book is all about.

for technical content, BASP3 is an excellent book; those who have issues with the grammer did not notice the literary style was geared more toward fisrt-person casual interaction - hence the series title "Programmer-to-Programmer."

Even someone experienced wih ASP (as I was) can benefit from the excellent VBScript reference and ADO explanations. The book provides very hard-to-find information, including how to interface with different types of databases (this is harder to find than you'd think) as well as detailed syntax descriptions for VBScript options (another difficult to find item).

This is not a book to learn web development! If you don't already have a good grasp of HTML, start somewhere else. If you've taken HTML as far as you can and are ready to learn dynamic content using ASP, this is the place to start.

By the time I finished reading this book and working through the examples I was writing somewhat complex ASP pages and publishing them on the web (thanks to some cheaper ASP compatible ISPs). It is clearly written (there are typos but they're not insurmountable) and shows instant results through coding.

An unexpected corollary to this book is that it actually helps with general Windows database programming. The database portions of this book basically deal with ADO, and this knowledge is applicable to Visual Basic 6 database projects (there are nuances, of course, and one must learn VB, Access and/or SQL Server, but the underlying theory and methodology is very similar). So you actually get more out of this book than you realize.

Possessing a working knowledge of HTML is a good thing before taking on ASP 3.0. The book will move slower if you don't. Also knowing something about JavaScript or VBScript will help, but the book does address this (it mostly uses VBScript with ASP 3.0), though having general knowledge of how scripting languages work (e.g., which runs from the server and which from the client and how and why) will speed up learning ASP.

This book will not prepare you for ASP.NET or ADO.NET. Those are different animals, and the book predates them both. Regardless, there is a lot of ASP 3.0 out there, and it will not likely go away soon. At the moment you have a choice: learn ASP 3.0 or learn ASP.NET. It depends on your needs. If you end up choosing ASP 3.0, this is the book to start with.

Covers a broad range of topics well enough to get running with VBscript, ASP and ADO. Occasional typos in the text and code but nothing that wasn't fairly obvious. Outstanding deal for a novice. If you are comfortable with VB already a number of chapters can be skipped but remaining chapters are VERY useful - esp. re: ADO. When looking at similar books make sure they are using ADO rather than the older DAO for DB access. Written in a clear, excellent style that is surprisingly homogenous given the number of authors. Highly recommended.

Folks, to get off my rear end, register here and post praise about the book speaks enough for itself. I have a small library of books on my desk here at work and they're all about the same, they teach you averagely well and then completely lose you at some point.The reason I'm writing this is because I've been trying to get into some language, and I have ZERO experience. I tried Java for dummies--it lost me, i tried sams xml in 20 days-totally lost me. I tried the "bible" series which were decent, I tried "Perl for dummies" lost me. (not feeling so smart here)anyway, I'm through the first 150 pages of this book and I'm eating it all up. I've had not ONE logical screw up, I know exactly what I'm doing, and finally damnit, I feel like I have a grasp, --even if small--of ASP. Its such a breath of fresh air that I've gotten off my rump with the book here in my lap and logged into here just to tell you about it. If you're like me--zero programming experience and basic html understanding, and you want to learn ASP--get this book immediately! It teaches by example, which is supremely wonderful.to the authors: thankyou thankyou thankyou!

Like all Wrox "Beginning..." books, this one does a fantastic job of taking the topic and explaining it from the ground up. The Good: No prior knowledge of ASP is necessary - trust me, I didn't have any and that's why I bought this book. The content is well organized and very thorough. Coming from an extensive client/server development background I wanted to get started learning web technologies and this was a perfect starting point for me. Even if you're new to programming entirely this book does a fairly decent job explaining even the most basic programming concepts and how they relate to the web. If you're not new to development, some of the more basic chapters can be skipped (like chapter 4: variables, chapter 6: objects, chapter 12: ADO, chapter 13: recordsets). Also, the last chapters on COM+, XML and the appendices were just excellent. The Bad: Also like most Wrox books, this one seems to be lacking an editor, and is the only reason why I couldn't give this book 5 stars. Halfway through the book it became a game of trying to find the typo on every page...and yes, there is almost one on EVERY PAGE... Most of these were annoying grammatical errors, but some (very few) were the deadly kind that crept into their examples. This makes it a little difficult to get things running, but in the long run makes you understand the content better by having debugged the author's code! Summary: If you're new to the web, or even new to programming, Active Server Pages is THE technology to get started with. This book does an excellent job starting you from scratch and getting you to an intermediate level by the end of the book...but you'll have to wade through the typos.

Without a doubt, the finest asp book I have read to date. Although not going into low level detail, a reader of this book with no web / database experience could easily build a full fledged application after reading this.