Customer Reviews

Programming Active Server Pages (Microsoft Programming Series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

These guys want to be what Developmentor is and put out junk like this. This book is a fine example of who Scot and Dan market to. If you don't know a thing about the subject then buy this book. Otherwise save your money and search for something with more substance. If you want to see just how aweful this book is then check it out in a bookstore first. Most of the examples don't work. There are code bugs, typos, and you'll need just about every free download that Microsoft has but doesn't ship with the MSDN subscription just to make some thing work. After you work through all of their bugs you should be fairly proficient at trouble shooting an IIS and IE4/5 application. My 4 year old son summed up the opinion of everyone that I know that's ever read this book. "Poopy Heads". There must be a lot of desperate people out there who need training because this book is embarrassing.

This book provides good, if somewhat dated, introductory coverage of writing dynamic content for web pages. It covers a lot more than just ASP (in spite of the title) but it does it well. If you are a beginning programmer, do not expect to be ready to do much after reading this. I would NOT recommend this title to intermediate or advanced programmers; there are numerous other titles out there that are more appropriate. It is appropriate for beginners or for systems managers who do need to know the nitty gritty of programming ASP.

While there are a few chapters in the book I found useful, I thought that most of this book was essentially an advertisement for Microsoft. If anyone who will ever use your web site will use a browser other than IE4, then the majority of the information in this book is useless. Even the chapters that contain useful information aren't especially well organized. I needed a fairly thorough reference when I was first working with ASP, and I found the Wrox ASP books to be much more helpful. I also like the O'Reilly book ASP in a Nutshell, though I understand the complaints I've heard about that one.

although this book was written at the end of 1997, and i should therefore give some leniency in opinion, i'm afraid that i must say it does not contain code which works with IIS 4 and IE 4.0 or 5.0 even though a sticker on the front says that it is compatible. in fact, the complete code that comes on the CD will not run on a WIN98 system with IE 5 thru an IIS 4.0 server. also, the book is not clear in many areas and leaves the reader to find other resources to understand or change the code. this book needs a serious revision and i would not recommend it for the newbie who want to learn how to program active server pages or use activeX technolgy or the expert who wants to brush up on his/her techniques until such time as this book is fully revised (even to the point of perhaps encompassing the new technologies which will come with windows2000/nt5).

I think the title of this book should be renamed as INTRODUCTION TO ASP TECHNOLOGY or INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT PRODUCTS.

This is an out of the box Microsoft tech topical guide disguised as a tech manual. For the price, one would expect more thorough analysis. The CD is problematic, I had to reload 4 times and load files manually just to get all the sample files. This book turns to other MS apps everywhere: MS agent, RDS, Front Page. There is not one sample app that stands alone, and it doesn't cover the MS products thouroughly enough to stand out there either. It also assumes you are programming on a machine with direct access to the web server. This is never true in my environment. All my apps are programmed on a remote machine then migrated upt o a production server. The two books I have come across that are worth their paper in this topic are ASP2.0in 21 days by SAMS and WROX Pro ASP. This is a great technology. Too bad This book will discourage many from taking it further.

This book was selected to be the primary text for one of my university classes. However, only a fraction of the book is devoted to the intended subject. Most of this book is an explanation of how wonderful Microsoft products are (yeah, right). If you want highlights of several different MS products with little in-depth explanations, then by all means, buy this. But if you want to learn ASP (as I still do), then buy something else...

This book is a good starting point for beginners as well as a good reference book for more advanced users. Remember, though, that this book is published by MS press, so there is considerable content that is MS proprietary. For example, there are chapters devoted to DHTML, IE 4.0, and ActiveX controls. But these technologies only work if you are developing exclusively for the IE browser, which not many people do. However, the chapter on ASP and the chapter on MTS are very good, but look out for the examples in the ASP chapter, they aren't optimized for larger databases. Plus the first chapter gives a good overview of web development concepts. Overall, a good book.

This book is more of a propaganda for IE4, than a serious study of ASP technology. Stay clear of this and buy some other book.

This book surveys a lot of topic (ActiveX, DHTML, JS, VBS, ASP, Component Development) in very concise way. One chapter of ASP can teach you more than some thick 600-page books. Possibly you need some HTML, Java, and VB knowledge to better appreciate this book.