Professional Active Server Pages 2.0 (Professional)

Rating:
Summary: Technically excellent, poorly written and edited
Review: This is the handbook to have for writing ASP applications. The first six chapters cover everything you need to write basic applications that dynamically generate web pages. The following chapters cover specific areas such as database access, site personalization, optimizations, and interacting with other applications. If you want to build web-enabled distributed applications on a Microsoft NT platform, you will need more than this book, but this book is essential. From a technical standpoint, I would give the book 5 stars. However, apparantly WROX forgot to edit it. It is certainly understandable that authors selected for their technical knowledge may require a little help in grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and writing style. It is unfortunate that WROX chooses not to provide this help, but rather to ship the books as soon as they are complete. WROX has an outstanding group of authors who cover every essential NT technology as well as many cross-platform technologies. I hope that WROX will take a closer look at the quality of the final product.

Rating:
Summary: Well done, in Plain English
Review: Want to learn to build your own amazon.com? It's in this book. You'll have to be proficient with ansi-SQL and/or ADO 2.0 in order to really take advantage of the information presented here. But overall it's a well presented book on ASP. If you plan to buy this and want to build true interactive sites with full database integration, pick up ADO 2.0 Programmer's Reference and Instant SQL Programming also from WROX Press, then you'll have a strong book base to build powerful web sites such as amazon.com. The only drawback is its concentration on VBScript rather than ECMAscript (aka JavaScript). Try and stay away from the VBScript presented in this book and use ECMAScript for the examples instead. The reason is because Microsoft and Netscape are finally agreeing on ECMAScript standards that will be much easier to translate into Client-side Cross-browser code if you use it for Server-side code now. As ECMAscript matures it will present a much more flexible environment to work in than VBScript will (much the same way that C compared to Visual Basic does now). I don't have a book recommendation for ECMAscript, I haven't found a good reference yet, the info on the web has been my resource. But if you're desparate for a reference, WROX Press also has a handbook called Instant JavaScript that isn't too bad, but has lots of room more improvement. Happy Building! Ciao -C