Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Active Server Pages in 14 Days

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

 

 

I have been working in computer field for 16 years and the book "teach yourself active server pages in 21 days" of this same author is one of the worst books I have bought. I stopped at middle of chapter 2 and could not go on. The author's writing skill and organization skill seems to be very low. Starting from the beginning of the book, the author uses long and unexplained examples. Large part of the book is made of long programs without careful explanation. It seems that the author was too busy to create some clear and simple examples. After all, I had to buy another book. So If you care about your time and money, don't buy this book.

I bought this book because I needed something to get me up and running quickly. Although I found many of the examples to be not particularly practical for what I needed to accomplish, I have to say that overall, the book helped me to meet my objective which was to have a web site that connected to my SQL Server database without using CGI.

In my environment, we are using the Microsoft suite of products such as Visual Interdev and SQL Server, so integrating the examples in house was not difficult, but for those not using these products, the examples will be difficult to implement. I had to "tweak" many of the examples to get them to work, so I would not recommend this book for beginners especially those with a limited knowledge of Access or SQL Server.

I do reference this book quite often when I encounter problems, but finding solutions sometimes takes a good deal of searching through the book. The book is lacking on topics such as Server timeouts and Database timeouts which I have encountered frequently, but the solutions are provided within the text if you know what to look for. More practical examples of how to use the methods and properties would have enhanced this book greatly.

After reading this book, I found I still needed to know a lot more than what was taught.

Although the book covers the basics, and I would agree, you can learn the basics of ASP in 14 days with this book, it was lacking in detail and didn't jump into the "heart" of ASP until a couple of chapters into the book. Let's face it: those who are learning ASP don't need to know about VBScript or the fundamentals of HTML forms.

Therefore, I think that more of the content should have focused on ASP than on other topics. Although the VBScript reference at the end of the book is nice, if I wanted to learn VBS, I would have bought a book on VBS.

Also, the book didn't cover databases (ADO) how I would have expected. It jumped into it too fast, and didn't cover anything other than MS Access databases. I would have liked at least a couple of pages on SQL: an SQL reference instead of a VBS reference would have made my day!

All and all, the book wasn't so bad. Although, in my humble opinion, it covered some of the matter too quickly without going into detail, I still learned enough to use ASP. I would not recommend this book to anyone who knows VBScript or to anyone who wants to know everything about ASP. On the other hand, I would recommend it for those who need to learn ASP quickly and for small-scale projects. As a reference manual, it doesn't serve much of a purpose, and that is what was most disappointing.

Structurally sound. Example based. Well layed out. Teach Yourself Active Server Pages In 14 Days accomplishes it goal. The premise of the work is not to turn one into a programmer overnight, but to jump-start by example, those who have little experience with the Microsoft Active-X Component Object Model (COM). As an experienced programmer of 14 years and designer of a large corporate intranet, I feel this book provides a good baseline for the novice and the experienced professional. It even tackles some higher level techniques concerning (by example) OOP paradigms, variable passing and platform configuration. I bought it, use it, and reccommend it!

The contents on the first week does provide a good overview of ASP. But since the Day 8, the author failed to illustrate and explain the usage of ASP in database. Those sample codes are rather complicated and not well modularized, not even with a detail explaination before and after. I bought this book and end up I learn ASP from the web. If you are thinking to learn ASP and develop web base applications, this book is not the right choice !!

The material continually references other sources for providing details which should be contained in the book. You would think that ASP objects and their methods/properties would be summarized in an appendix in a half-way decent manual.

I've used this book to help me get introduced to ASP and found it useful. Remember this is a beginner's book and for the money, it's worth it. It will give you a general overview with some practical examples. After reading it, however, you won't find yourself going back to it often...

This book started off quiet well, and I had great hopes for it, until I came to interact with chapter 8, there chaos started ! The book up to that possion seems nice and easy, and the chapter starts quiet the same, but then all of the sudden it starts complicating and using complex stuff without explaining it before or after ! there are bugs with the code that I got, there are errors in the porgrams (after spending an hour tring to figure out what the code is suppose to do I find some errors in it and fix them.......) Don't buy this book (unless you what a cool looking book on your bookshelf).

This is a really really bad book. I know Cold Fusion, so I was able to get started rather quickly, but this book-- ooh, let me tell you. One page on microsoft's site helped me considerably more. I'm gonna go and buy something else now. What a waste.

I must agree with the other comments made about this book. I do not feel that this book was worth my money at all. I wish I would have read this before I bought and saved myself the $30 some dollars it cost. I is not until like the forth or fifth week before you really start getting into the meat of the program! And the most important reason I purchased the book was to get experience with dynamically driven (database) websites. This book is extremely lacking in the true power of ASP.