Rating: 
Summary: Learn Active Server Pages!
Review: This is an excellent book providing a solid, comprehensive basis for the use of VB Script in designing Active Server Pages.The only omission I noticed was any instruction on how to plug data from a form into an e-mail message and send it on it's way. Fortunately, Mitchell covers this topic on his web-site. You'll have to read carefully, as there are quite a few typos; and experienced programmers may quibble with the approach Mitchell takes to some of the code, but this isn't really criticism--I consider it part of the learning process. This a well-written book. I had trouble setting up the Personal Web Server on my old computer, but after that it was cake.
Rating:
Summary: Designing Active Server Pages
Review: This is by far the best, if not the only book I've seen published on advanced ASP programming methodologies. It's very well written with plenty of examples; however, it does assume the level of a seasoned professional with a solid understanding of the web paradigm and object-oriented programming principles even though VBScript the language itself in it's current state is more or less a pseudo implementation embracing only encapsulation and excluding all traces of inheritance and polymorphism. In a nutshell it focuses on practical techniques and approaches to common web development tasks while teaching programmers how to minimize errors by maximizing reusability through the leveraging of code far beyond the scope of includes and utility functions and, in my opinion is definitely a major step in the VB.Net direction. Personally, I have a very strong object-oriented programming background in Powerbuilder, C++ and Jave and found the examples in this book more suggestive than anything else but still very useful. It inspired me to write an ASP class library which promotes the assembly of fully featured, database enabled applications in mere minutes. If you are new to web development or unfamiilar with object-orientation you may want to consider a beginner to intermediate level text before making an attempt at this one. Overall, a pleasure to own and well worth the cost.
Rating:
Summary: Designing Active Server Pages
Review: This is by far the best, if not the only book I've seen published on advanced ASP programming methodologies. It's very well written with plenty of examples; however, it does assume the level of a seasoned professional with a solid understanding of the web paradigm and object-oriented programming principles even though VBScript the language itself in it's current state is more or less a pseudo implementation embracing only encapsulation and excluding all traces of inheritance and polymorphism. In a nutshell it focuses on practical techniques and approaches to common web development tasks while teaching programmers how to minimize errors by maximizing reusability through the leveraging of code far beyond the scope of includes and utility functions and, in my opinion is definitely a major step in the VB.Net direction. Personally, I have a very strong object-oriented programming background in Powerbuilder, C++ and Jave and found the examples in this book more suggestive than anything else but still very useful. It inspired me to write an ASP class library which promotes the assembly of fully featured, database enabled applications in mere minutes. If you are new to web development or unfamiilar with object-orientation you may want to consider a beginner to intermediate level text before making an attempt at this one. Overall, a pleasure to own and well worth the cost.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent work, but please organize the sample code
Review: This VERY young author has done something seasoned technical writers twice his age have not often done: written an extremely useful, information and well thought out book, with plenty of implementable examples, and all in a book of less than 350 pages. It so often seems that these kinds of books suffer from "mission creep", and hence bloat into the 1500-page monsters we so often see. Because he was able to keep the scope of his task clearly in mind, he also provides a thorough "Further Reading" section at the end of each chapter, where he provides links to a number of on-line articles. (Yes, you could find these yourself, but how great that a professional in the field has taken the time to find them seek them out for you -- and I was glad all that extra stuff wasn't in the book itself.) The one complaint I have is that the source code for this book, which you can download from the O'Reilly site, is a chaotic, inextricable mess of files with arbitrary names that are impossible to link to any specific examples in the book (I wouldn't mind that the file names are arbitrary, if he told you in the book which file a given example was associated with -- but no luck there). Really inexcusable.
Rating: 
Summary: Wouldn't it be nice...
Review: Upon getting an ASP project dropped in my lap I quickly discovered the horrible practices that ASP encourages. This book seemed like a godsend through the first chapter. Mr. Mitchell identified a problem... It just seems as if he should have quit writing the book upon discovering that it's mission is just impossible. Getting code reuse out of a technology who answers reuse with SSI's and COM just doesn't work. It seems like the chapters on reusing form validation were WAY too long.. Does anyone even really need that stuff ? Maybe it's just me. At any rate, I'd suggest going to the bookstore and reading the first couple chapters there. Past that, you'll be dissapointed.. (with ASP and the book.)
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