Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Active Server Pages in 24 Hours

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I bought this book because of the reviews on this site. This book turned out to be more advanced than expected. If you are going to buy this book, make sure you know HTML, some JavaScript, basic SQL, and VBScript. Through the examples I was able to pick up the SQL and VBScript knowledge with a fair amount of effort. The thing I liked about this book was that it stuck to the topic at hand. Lots of other computer books stray far away from their topics. Several times in the book the authors said...that a certain topic was beyond the scope of the book and if you want more info look elsewhere. Another nice thing about this book was that you can complete 75% of the examples using free downloadable software (MS Personal Web Server). On the other hand, the IIS/NT Server topics were over my head. You will learn a lot if you type in all of the sample code and try to follow along with the examples. On the downside, this book seemed to skip from topic to topic without any real transition.

This book was very disappointing, to say the least. I purchased it with the intent of being on my way to understanding the fundamentals of ASP programming; unfortunately, like many other reviewers have pointed out, the authors could stand to enroll in a few high school level English classes. If you don't have an intermediate to advanced level of VBScript and HTML knowledge, don't buy this book! Save yourself some money and master VBScript before tackling ASP, as doing so will prove to help you immensely. Having read this book and done the examples and questions I feel like several hundred pages are missing--most of the examples/exercises asked you to code things that weren't even mentioned once in the book or that were exceptionally vague.

I found this book to be an excellent source of information on how to set up ASP pages to do some *real* tasks. It really is wonderful and provides an excellent level of detail to the reader on a variety of relevant subjects.

HOWEVER, please do not consider this book for one who is a new programmer. I have been programming for a number of years, and found many of the concepts discussed in the book required several readings for full understanding. Contrary to the "beginner" rating on the cover, I believe this book requires the reader to have some proficiency in a language such as Visual Basic.

If you do not know VBScrip, forget about this book or you will get yourself in trouble. I had to ask for help from the programer in my company everytime I turn to next page. Gee... I gave up.

I recently purchased this book to learn how to make my webpages interact with a live database. This book does that and more.

After reading other people's reviews I need to qualify my "it's incredible" rating. I am a PC fanatic who has never used VBscript. However, I did do a bit of basic programming in high school. If "for . . .next" is not a foreign statement to you, then you will greatly benefit from this book. Because the examples given are very practical, they can easily be modified to fit your needs. Change a date here, a statement there and you will have the custom page you envisioned.

Personally, I am simply amazed at what I learned in less than a day. If you are not a programmer but are not intimidated by a few lines of code, this is the book for you. If you're stumped but you hate buying computer books because you usually like to figure it out yourself, this is the book for you.

The examples in this book are way too complicated for a beginner. There are much less complex ways of doing the things they do in this book. I had a very difficult time understanding their code and modifying it for my own use.

I'm going to the bookstore right now to return it.

I needed to learn (from scratch) about ASP and enough VBScript to get a simple form running. I slogged through 5-1/2 'hours' (chapters) and realized the whole book was going to skim over the main points. The chapter on gathering data from the user should have helped me; it gave a couple simple examples, but not enough information to customize to what I need.

I took Active Server Pages for Dummies out from the library and, though I've never wanted to read a Dummies book, find it a lot more systematic in its approach and a much easier read.

I'm a mid level VB developer looking to gain some insight on ASP.

Overall the book was well organized covering an aspect of ASP in a different chapter.

The best part of the book were the examples and exercises at the end of the chapter. Unfortunately, this was the only place where the authors summarizied the ideas in the chapter. It would have been nice if they had summarized the information within the chapter and highlighted key ideas/points.

They also glossed over basic HTML syntax like TR,TD, Input, Command, parameter, recordsets and the parameters these commands use. A brief chapter summarizing this syntax would have been nice instead of assuming you know it already.

What I found particularly irratiting was I had to reread sentences 2 to 3 times to determine what the authors were driving at. Subject - verb conjugation seems to be foreign to these writers although their sentences didn't contain many run-ons. Hey, I'm not an english professor!

-->Not a bad book, but there are probably better books out there for the "real" beginner. <--

This book fails its purpose. The layout of the info is all wrong and there is no gentle step-through. I bought the book because other books I bought (SQL, VB) in the Sams series have taught me well.

If you are new to ASP and pick up this book, you will find to be a very difficult language to learn simply because this book rushes into things too quickly and leaves the reader quite baffled.

If you want to learn ASP and if you want to learn it well, buy the Beginning Active Server Pages book by Wrox. That was the book I used to pick up ASP I still flip through it every now and again.

Unless you know VB Script this book is a total waste of time and money. I know some VB, but a lot of the stuff was pretty foreign to me and the explanations weren't very helpful. I've been told ASP is easy but this book sure didn't make it seem that way. I would recommend learning VB Script first and then this book may be more helpful.