Customer Reviews

A Preview of Active Server Pages+

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was hesitant to buy this. A book based upon beta technology didn't appeal to me at first and honestly it made me a bit upset that my favorite publisher of technical books (Wrox press) would put something like this out....

After reading though the first three chapters and skiming the rest of the book I can tell you this title lives up to the standards of Wrox press, it provides an excellent intorduction to this new technology and explains why we as ASP deveopers need to know about ASP+ now.

Here are some facts for you:

- Wrox didn't write this alone, Microsoft came to them asking them to write it, knowing Wrox's quality; Microsoft worked with the authors at Wrox to help create this book, because they want to prepare us for the changes coming.

- This book was handed out at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Orlando (early July 2000) along with the first tech preview of ASP+ & Visual Studio .NET, apparently Microsoft wanted to provide the attendies with some solid documentation on this tech preview and that was probably behind (at least it part) this books coming into existance at the time it did.

- This book covers ASP+ and not Visual Studio .NET. The two are tightly connected (as the book explans), but you will most likely not need Visual Studio .NET to code for ASP+ (just as you do not need Visual InterDev to code ASP). Visual Studio .NET is discussed, but it is not the primary focus of discussion and all the sample apps could just as easily be developed in Notepad.

- ASP+ is part of NGWS runtime (read the book to find out what this is) which will most likely first arrive in an upcomming service pack (or possibly option pack) for Windows 2000. This will most likely happen prior to the release of Visual Studio .NET, so the contents of this book may be useful a lot sooner than you think.

For those who work with ASP I think that this book is a must. You may want to wait for the second printing as they had some troubles with the images etc (see wrox.com/beta for details).

I don't know if it was the book or just the technology that impressed my but I found it difficult to put the book down. Clearly MS has a winner here and Wrox does a good job introducing it.

Serious ASP developer: This is a must buy now. Casual ASP developer: wait for second edition / public availability of .NET.

It's true that it's currently the only ASP+ book but it's great nonetheless. I was waiting with great expectation it's release at Amazon since I'm plugged to their ASPToday web site.

This book is worth 5 stars because of the following:

It came out barely after MS announced it but contains a lot of information about the subject.

MS has work with the writers to make sure the content will be right.

It is well-written by known ASP programmers (and writers).

The content is get-to-the-point on current ASP issues and how ASP+ will fix this.

Show ASP+ coding with both VB7 & C#.

There is a lot more information than the ASPToday's articles so that the book is more than handy.

Written well enough for newcomers to understand it, but I would strongly suggest having ASP experience before-hand. Remember it's a PREVIEW and it means that it's good for people who wants to know it advance where MS is going with ASP.

I think this is a good book for an introduction to the new features of ASP+ (ASP.Net). The topics it covers, such as data binding, controls, and Web services, really focus on the new features that make ASP.Net so powerful. The only problem that I had with the book is that most of the examples, especially towards the end with the more complex chapters, were all written in C#. Since I have never written a line of C++ this made things a little more difficult for me to understand. I would have liked to see the Wrox team show all the examples in C# and VB throughout the entire book, or at least a better mix. Overall though the book was worth it - thinking about the applications that I have written, I was really able to see what the changes would be and how they could help web applications.

Although I am a little late I'd like to add my review for those of you who are planning to purchase this book. I think it is a nice pioneering review for ASP+. (ASP.NET). A lot has been said about .NET, the only thing I'd like to add that this book was probably the first one to be published about the .NET platform even before the name was .NET. So the info in the book is still relevant but the names have changed a little bit. If you are interested in learning the .NET platform get a more recent source other wise to learn ASP.NET I believe it is a good choice. I'll give it 5 points mainly because the examples are written in c# which is a nice change. If you'd prefer VB there are still enough examples.

This book was distributed to PDC attendees in Orlando, and had as much solid info in it as the rest of the conference put together. Amazing that it could have been assembled this early in the development cycle.

This book is most useful if you have access to the Visual Studio.NET tech preview distributed at PDC. It will also be helpful when the beta is generally available, which Bill Gates says is "this fall".

Four stars instead of five just because it is rough in spots, almost certainly as a consequence of being rushed into print. But don't think twice about getting it if you are doing serious work with Active Server Pages in VS.NET preview or beta - just do it.

There will be several more changes to the .NET framework. Notice how I said .NET and not ASP+.... It is no longer called that. The examples are okay but the explanations are not that great and lacks the typical reader involvement that I have grown to love from the WROX family. This is my first disappointing review for WROX and hope it's my last. Save your money for BizTalk or Commerce Server books until this is a fully baked language and framework.

According to Ch. 9 all session variables are there for, is to write debug pages. Whoa! that's VERY interesting, however I would have thought that, just maybe, there is more to that than what this book offers, not. A very disappointing manual as a whole, and particurlarly annoying when one realises than the only reason this book is as thick as it is, is due not to content, but use of large fonts and continual repetitions. Not to be recommended.

This is one great book that I found when I started working in the new Dot area. But surely this is not for beginers. You must have little bit knowledge about Microsoft web dev paradigm along with general web development to get along with it. The examples are very useful. And as usual the authors never bore you. I highly recommend this book as a great buy.

This is a great book (as to be expected from Alex Homer) for beginning to understand .Net and ASP+. It doesn't go into the .Net framework in too much detail but explains how ASP has progressed to ASP+ and ADO to ADO+. A must read for any ASP devloper who wants to move to .Net