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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Cheap...But You Get What You Pay For, December 6, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: ASP, ADO, and XML Complete (Paperback)
This book is chock full of information yet offered at a low price. To hold all of this information, the publishers had to squeeze a lot of data into every page, making it hard on the eyes. This is a big point, especially when you're trying to learn a new subject...your eyes need occasional rest stops. The more important point is that the presentation is sorely lacking in organization. The detail is melded into the intro, the sections often include too many new concepts at once and many times, the examples are situated far from the detail. Further, important ideas are not often reinforced, or if they are, the reinforcement is usually not done at the conclusion but is instead reiterated soon after the point is introduced. Finally, the word usage and sentence construction is very poor. I'm not reading this to get an English instruction but when faced with this kind of poor writing, its often difficult to understand exactly what the author meant. This is critical when trying to understand new concepts and ideas. You would be way better off buying Wrox's Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must for ASP Programming, July 21, 2002
This review is from: ASP, ADO, and XML Complete (Paperback)
I'm an experienced programmer with 10 years of VB Client/Server and new to the WEB. The WEB is maddeningly different. This book has provided me with THE road map of modern ASP development. It is well organized. Each chapter is well selected. The content of each chapter is such that the subject is adequately covered and I can always get the book from which the chapter is extracted if I want more information. As one commenter put it, its like getting the work product of a half dozen research assistants, each of whom sifted dozens of books. It is clearly aimed at the person who wants to understand the subject. There are no "To Create..." sequences that walk through the IDE to create a brain-dead and useless example so prevalent in the Microsoft programmer's guides. It assumes that the reader has a high school education, a keen mind and is willing to use both. Looking for a book that will do your thinking for you? This is not it. There are plenty of sample code snippets. They are there to give the reader working examples that augment the text. I anticipate keeping this book handy as a reference on WEB ASP assignments. There is a caveat for Microsoft oriented WEB developers. It does not address Visual Interdev. For that topic I recommend Wrox's "Beginning WEB Development with Visual Interdev 6." I should also mention that this book does not teach one how to program. There are other resources for that. It does teach relational database principles, SQL, ADO, XML, and how to use XML in Microsoft SQL Server. The crowning glory is an excellent "class project," a walk through Microsoft's Biz Talk application.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A True Handbook, June 12, 2002
This review is from: ASP, ADO, and XML Complete (Paperback)
Save the famous tomes; this one actually comes in handy. Maybe it's just the size, look and feel of this little workhorse, or maybe it's because it feels like a super-thick pamphlet in your hands that you feel like you can treat in any way without regard to its physical condition, but somehow this book had surprised me my being so darn usable! I have rarely encountered a book that makes it so easy to get right to the subject you're trying to look up, get the facts/explanations you need... and get back to work. My pages are all dog-eared and highlighted. If you're a harried developer, I think you'll know the value of that. The premise of the book is simple: combine the good parts of other books into one. So Chapter 1, "The Microsoft Toolset" is lifted straight out of the "E-Commerce Developer's Guide" by Noel Jerke, Chapter 2 is "adapted" from "Visual Basic Developer's Guide to ASP and IIS" by A. Russell Jones, and so on. The surprising effect of all of this is that it's like having a research assistant who slogged through a mountain of material (useful and otherwise) for you and then handed you the highlights with post-it notes so you can save time. If one of those sources interests you, you can always read the book it came from. Or cast it aside and move on to the next piece. And as books go, it has a high percentage of lookup tables and code samples. Why? Because that's part of the "good stuff" worth "adapting" from the other books. This won't win any book awards, but it does get yanked off the shelf more often than most others.
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