Customer Reviews

Working With Active Server Pages

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I found this book to be surprisingly confusing and that's why I consiter it to be harmful -- you'll spend your time but won't gain anything useful. If I had a chanse I would bring this book back for refund. Total waste of money and time.

Maybe if you have been programming in c++ for twenty years you would have an easier time understanding why they go into such lengths to talk about OOP. Filled with unclear examples, trivial personal asides and a egotistical writing style that drove me nuts. I kept hearing The Church Lady saying "Well, we like ourselves, don't we...". I agree one-hundred percent with everything that the other reviewers giving a score of 1 star have said. This book is a waste of time!

Plenty of trivial data. If you're using this book to learn ASP you won't even TOUCH a computer through the first 100 pages of being babied through "we remember when..." reflections (as if the authors are the only people who used computers prior to 1992). The other three quarters of the book are just thoroughly confusing and needlessly complex. For example, one of the early samples in the book, meant to demonstrate the Application Onstart Event, needlessly incorporates the ADO database connection and recordset objects, which aren't even explained for another five chapters. (It took me a while to figure out that I really wasn't supposed to understand the example.) The section on ADO references practical examples available on the book's website, which may have been helpful, but the website seems to have been taken down. Source code is available at the FTP site, but none of the required #include files nor a listing the actual directory structure the example uses are available (and just try explaining this problem to QUE's non-computer-literate customer support people). A complete waste of time and money.

This book has been needlessly slammed, in my opinion. I have 40 or more other ASP books, (lots of those red/yellow ones) and I learned stuff from this book that have not been mentioned in any of those.

The strength of this book is the history of ASP, the how and why of it's development. There is a level of detail, and clarity missed in many other books. It doesn't cover everything (none do) but it covers include files, vbscript, COM objects and the usual cast of subjects with a refreshing level of detail and interest.

Don't buy this book if you WANT ANSWERS MISTER. But if you are a disciple, get this one, as well. Can't beat the price!!

The authors have either been completely brainwashed by Microsoft, or have been paid a substantial amount of money by Microsoft to give rave review to their book. The authors preach how ASP will change the entire world... absolutely untrue. This book takes 6 chapters before you actually start coding ASP. A 6 chapter introduction is FAR too long! It's also incredible to see an entire chapter devoted to bad-mouthing PERL. This book assumes that UNIX does not exist.. and everyone in the world has been assimilated by Microsoft. You're better off buying another book!

Don't buy this book, it's just a waste of time. The book is poorly organized, the content is confusing and the index is inadequate.

Question:

ASP doesn't seem to like the following piece of code:

var_1 = request("fieldname") start loop if (someobject.Line = var_1) then do something end if end loop

Basically, it seems that the if statement doesn't work when a variable is assigned to another like: var_1 = Request("field")

When I write var_1 = 5 The statement works. I find it very strange, any suggestions ? thanks

Database coverage is confusing at best and the coverage of the rest of the book is severely lacking. Look elsewhere for your asp information

I found this text be extremely useful when I had to learn ASP quickly to write an entire web application. I still use this book along with Interdev online help as my ASP references.

I've been struggling with this book for the past 6 months or so. The book appears to have been written while ASP was still in beta development, which doesn't give me much confidence as to the accuracy of the information. With the release of IIS 4.0, the relevancy of this book is further reduced.

Lots of code examples, but I find that they point you to the web site for large examples - that's fine, except that the web site has been re-organized, and it's not particularly easy to find the new location for the online code examples. In this case, a CD-ROM with the code examples may have been a better idea. Even then, there are inconsistencies. I've found that they sometimes suggest one thing, then a few chapters later tell you not to do that. Frustrating.

I now find myself ignoring the book and turning to online ASP development resources, such as 15seconds.com and Microsoft's Site Builder Network. If you're still working with IIS 3.0, and don't mind some frustration, you might want to look at this book. But I wouldn't.