Essential ASP for Web Professionals Essential Web professionals: Amazon.co.uk: Elijah Lovejoy: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Although half as long as other titles on the subject, Essential ASP for Web Professionals is probably just as valuable for getting started with ASP. Aimed at the beginning or intermediate Web developer, this is an extremely useful cookbook-style tutorial with examples that will help readers of all levels use ASP (and JavaScript) to create Web pages dynamically by concisely offering a series of simple, effective ASP examples. The full source code is included, along with extensive annotations and suggestions for extending the code in custom projects. This approach is ideal for anyone who appreciates a hands-on approach to learning.

The examples themselves are immediately practical. First off, a date-time script--and an example--gives out a random "tip of the day" read from a text file on the server. Then it's on to basic database programming with ADO and ASP. After a quick tour of database basics, readers learn some expert techniques for generating forms based on any database table without changing ASP code. (Not only will you be able to easily generate HTML forms on the fly, you'll also find out how to update databases from forms automatically, again without changing ASP code.) This flexible, "soft" approach to working with databases will help you write ASP code that's a lot easier to maintain.

The book culminates in a full-featured shopping-cart example for an e-commerce site. Techniques demonstrated include maintaining state with cookies. Throughout, the book does a fine job of showing how ASPs often work together to get the job done, instead of creating monolithic (and unmaintainable) scripts. For instance, the shopping-cart example uses no less than 11 ASP files. (A quick "site map" diagram shows the organisation.) Besides the basics, Essential ASP also offers a guide to some best practices, ensuring you'll learn the right way to do things as well as pick up the basics quickly.

Efficiently packaged, yet filled with some very useful code, this is a truly worthwhile tutorial for ASP development that's exactly what the busy Web professional needs to get started with this powerful standard. --Richard Dragan

Product Description

Covers how ASP works: server side vs. client side scripting, how ASP allows IIS to interpret languages: JScript, VBscript, PerlScript, and others.

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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

A no-nonsense book on ASP 17 Nov 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

If you are familiar with HTML and a bit of programming then the next logical step for you should be learning a web-language.

You mainly have 3 choices. ASP, PHP and JSP.

Choose PHP if you have a strong Unix background.
Choose JSP if you have a strong Java background.
Choose ASP in any other case.

And choose "Essential ASP for Web Professionals" because it is a great book, an IDEAL book for my own personal needs.

The stong points of the book are :
- ONLY JavaScript is used (NO VBScript)
- Practical, real-world examples.
- Complete implementation of a shoping cart

The only weak point I can think of is the use of MS Access as the Database system. But you can as well move on to Oracle or whatever else having used MS Access as a starting point.

Strong reccomendation for anyone out there wanting to learn how to create dynamic sites using ASP.

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Essential ASP...title perhaps a little misleading 2 Feb 2005

By Mr. Robert Woolsey

The book starts off well, but it lacks depth. If you are looking to expand your ASP then I would suggest a different book.

The thing that got me is that if you're looking for a specific functionality explanation, then you will quite often find items overlooked or little to no explanation given.

Great book if you need to get to grips with the basics, but from the content, I think the book title is a little misleading. I have recently learnt ASP and come from a commercial programming background which is perhaps why I found the book disappointing.

Only ok 14 April 2003

I have been able to get my ASP program up and running, but this book only really details the use of JavaScript with ASP. If you need VBScript don't buy this book. It is ok in what it covers but I have found ASP in a Nutshell more useful. I would suggest some other general introduction as "In a Nutshell" is really only a reference book.... but I haven't found a suitable one yet!