Active Server Pages 3.0 from Scratch (Paperback)

Till I found my feet, I referred now and then to online ASP references in the early chapters, and also found myself scratching my head a lot towards the end. However, if you want to learn some quite complex and 'cool' stuff then it is definitely worth persevering.

As others have mentioned there are code errors but most of the time they are pretty obvious and besides there is the errata page on Mr Chase's web site. I don't aim to excuse the editor for sloppy work, but in the end I found the code errors useful for improving my own debugging and understanding of the code. I could spot the typo straight away.

It would have been nice to have had an appendix detailing ASP objects and so forth but then that is I suspect against the spirit of the book. It is not a programmer's reference.

If you want to make a start with ASP, you could do far far worse than this book. I hope the author writes a more advances book and maybe others on other web technologies and aspects of the web.

I am very experienced at all sorts of programming, but to date had no experience of web development, ASP or Visual Basic. I didn't even know what ASP was or what it did.

I hit my deadline.

This was exactly the right book for me because it started pretty much from first principles, and covered a very wide breadth of topics over and above ASP itself. HTML, database design, scripting, web servers, debugging and an awful lot more disciplines are touched upon. Because the book dealt with subjects that I knew something about as well as some subjects I knew little or nothing about, I was able to very quickly see how ASP stood in relation to the other pieces in the Jigsaw puzzle that was my project.

For a person in the position of having to learn a new discipline in a hurry, this book is invaluable.

There are only two notes of caution that I would sound. Firstly, the criticisms of the other reviewers about several innacuracies in the example code are certainly true. For me though, debugging these was actually helpful for my understanding of the material (!) although I realise that not everybody would take this view, and that the code should really have been properly checked. In defence of the example code, I will say that the ficticious web site that you build as you progress through the book contains a wide variety of features. These have clearly been given a lot of thought, because whenever I wanted to add a new feature to MY project, there was something either suitable or very similar shown and explained in the book. I was able to take the example code and easily modify it to suit my own ends. Excellent.

The other reservation I have is that the introductory nature of the book, combined with the gradual way in which the example site is built and the slightly miserly index mean that quickly locating answers to specific problems is not this book's forte. You need another type of book as well, a more complete, more narrowly focused and frankly a fatter book which you can refer to as you become more competent with ASP.