Customer Reviews

Special Edition Using Active Server Pages

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This book stands alone among the horde of ASP books available! Even though there are a couple of obvious typos, this book covers it all! It ties every part of the development aspect together and servers as a great guidebook and reference book. I give the other ASP books to my junior level developers to learn from - but my senior staff also turns to this book as the go-to ASP reference. Definitely money well-spent!

I am a certified MCSE. I am also currently pursuing an MSCD certificate. I do admit that some sections of the example codes in this book are not perfectly clear nor precise, however, the ideas and concepts of these example codes are pretty straight forward and self-explainatory. The book is very well organized and easy to read. It covers a vast topics in ASP, including DCOM, ADO, VB, InterDev, ODBC, MTS, ActiveX, Ms Queue, and also SQL Database -- basically, if all the previous topics mentioned above needed to be fit into 700 pages, Scott Johnson did it RIGHT, you can't ask for more. If you are working with MS SQL server 6.5 and IIS 4 server, and that you are following the exercises in the book like I had, you will be shock to realize at the end that you have built an n-tier internet and extranet front-end database application! Excellent book.

I suppose that the first clue to the number of errors in the book is the fact that they were unable to get the author's first name spelled correctly.

Be warned that the ASP examples in this book are riddled with errors. I've had to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out the correct syntax of commands and make sense of the many inconsistencies in the book.

It's also interesting that Que books is unable to spell even the easiest of terms correctly (e.g. "OLE" is spelled "OEL" in some places; "ASP" is spelled "APS" is some places, etc.)

Save your money & your time; you'll find that the WROX books are edited and proofread much better.

ASP can be a handfull for those who are new to programming or who program other languages like JAVA or C/C++ like myself. For instance when you create a if statement block in ASP you have to start with a "if ... then" and end the block with a "end if". Which drove me crazy for a while, I kept using curly braces. These little differences are well documented and explained in the book. I usually go by examples when I'm programming a new language, and this book helped me through it. I would still recommend you use JSP or PHP if you have the choice of picking your language, but if you have to use ASP I would buy a book like this one to help you through.

I found this book very useful to give out to our web development staff as a reference tool. The newer team members found the book difficult to follow because the numerous typographical errors in the book. But overall, like most books from Que, it made a good addition to our library.

I had written a previous comment about the book Using ASP.. and in particular about the author Scott Johnson.. He did email me recently explaining that he had some technical/system problems and had not forgotten about my reqest.. In a nutshell, he did respond initially when I had some questions and again..Perhaps I had commented too soon about his character.. Any author that takes the time to communicate back says something. "They care about the people that buy their product"..

Kim

I don't know why anyone would rate this book any higher than a one if they read the whole thing. Creating your own ActiveX Server Components is the single most important thing about using ASP technology for developers and yet the code offered by the book screws that up! Just look at Chapter 18, page 402, listing 18.12 SCCLASS.CLS. Anyone who understands anything about programming knows about keywords. Just try and use Visual Basic to create the code in the Public Sub OnStartPage method (Set as as mySc.Application <-- Double as vision there).In addition this same routine attemps to create an instance using the "as" keyword instead of "=". That won't happen. The author of this book must be laughing all the way to the bank. Amazon should hire some real programmers to review these types of books before they waste the readers time and money with this kind of junk.

I was sorely disappointed with this book. There are too many mistakes in this book, in the source code, the examples, and the diagrams. At times, the instructions given are not complete, and skips steps which I guess he assumes people should know. This makes it very frustrating to get anything done. In addition, the index is not very complete, so it's not easy to find the information you want.
I am at the point where I'm going to dump the book and just get the book everyone else I know is getting: Professional Active Server Pages 2.0.

This book provided us with the ability to learn and implement an entire Active Server Page website in about 4 weeks! Although we had no prior ASP knowledge, we were well versed in HTML, Visual Basic and SQL. Without question, this was and continues to be one of the single most important references we have at the office.

The book clearly explained Active Server Page objects such as Response, Request, and Server and gave us sample code that we were able to quickly use for our own project. The chapters on ADO provided us the tools we needed to implement a mission critical real-time web-based DB application.

We highly recommend this book!

You would think that some computer experts, most likely PHDs could write a simple programming book without soure code errors!!!! This really messed me up. So much from the money that I spent on it. I threw it in the trash.