Amazon.co.uk Review
Active Server Pages are generated on the fly in response to requests from users. ASP itself is strongly associated with Microsoft IIS but, as author Greg Buczek points out early on, such dynamically generated pages can be produced by many server side technologies.
ASP Developer's Guide concentrates entirely on Microsoft ASP technologies using IIS, VBScript and ADO extensively. This makes sense as these technologies are designed to work together.
Unusually, this book isn't project based, although the last 120 pages or so do describe a product catalogue, shopping cart and customer support database. Mostly, it's concerned with explaining the intricacies of IIS as used for ASP. This is sorely needed material. Using IIS to create and manage dynamic pages is non-trivial. After the introductory material Greg Buczek uses each chapter to introduce, explain and demonstrate each aspect of ASP. Each area is liberally sprinkled with working VBScript code snippets, including the odd gotcha and neat examples of good practice. For example, using the Option Explicit to override VBScripts default action of enabling ad hoc variable creation and usage. The section on cookies is particularly valuable and should be required reading for Web authors. Greg Buczek is a big fan of cookies and gives many examples of ways in which they can do good work, but he also warns against relying on them completely as so many Web users routinely block or delete them.
ASP Developers Guide is lucid, organised and written with the enthusiasm you'd expect from an MCSD. Some will wonder why, for a technology which is supposed to make life simpler, ASP seems so much more complex than Perl and CGI. Still, if you're planning to work with ASP, though, you won't find a better text.--Steve Patient
Product Description
Using Active Server Pages (ASP) is a fairly difficult programming task. This text provides a solid developer's guide to ASP for use in the professional environment. It begins with the basics, and moves on to scripting and debugging, and the CD-ROM includes sample ASP applications.
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