Customer Reviews

ASP Programming for the Absolute Beginner

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

 

 

Learn ASP -- the hard way: by acting as editor for premier press.

I bought this book because I am tired of the dummies/idiots/morons series' condescension, and found some solace in this book. However, the code is contradictory. The same line of code could be reprinted on three different pages and have three minor differences. Even the source included on the cd-rom is different than the book. To the "absolute beginner" these differences seem insignificant until you try to run the code and get only errors. I am learning ASP, but because I have to debug somebody else's code.

There are two great lessons from this book: 1) minor differences in code are crucial, 2) find a book that knows that.

I'm taking a course and we were given the book SAMS "Teach Yourself E-Commerce Programming with ASP". Though I think that will be an excellent reference, I felt it made assumptions that I had some basic programming knowledge beforehand. I was struggling and kind'a lost. I went thorough every book on ASP on the bookstore shelf and I selected this one to help me out. I was looking for "Active Server Page Programming for Dummies, Second Edition". That book was out of stock and I selected Mr. Gosney's book. It's very clear with good exercises. It explains installing both IIS and Personal Web Server. It relates ASP with other apps like Front Page 2000. So far it the best, introductory book that I've found. One can pretty much learn without any additional instructional help.

I found this books is very helpful of the programmer who want to learn ASP from the beginner. However you need to know some concept from visual basic, html and some operation task in windows environment. The author explain very clearly and easy to understand. Anyway I found three point that should be change based on my experinece along with this books: 1) If you are install PWS from the windows 98se CD-ROM, it won't work. You need to find this solution from the following hyperlink to the install it successfully: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];Q246081 the books didn't cover this problem. For windows 2000 it is fine. 2) The code published in the books is too small it made me very difficult to read. 3) The most of the example of the source code is based on the game. The sample code should be focus on the read example that the technology apply for such as the real task that we might face when we get a project on web development. Base on that 3 disadvantage is the reson that I give only 4 start. If there is a future release of this book, I hope this 3 point would be change.

Admittedly this book is a little outdated for today's environment, but the book series as a whole is great for learning the nuts and bolts of a specific technology.

I reviewed this as a possible student textbook because of the examples. However the examples are insufficiently explained, and the games ! Gross !! The books structure is unclear, hopping around with other web-technologies. I would have preferred a clear ASP focus with programming examples in VBScript and in JavaScript. The book by Dr R. Mellor is clearly superior for this market segment.