Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #584163 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1277 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
At over 1,200 pages, Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 is an interesting and informative-- though not a light--read. It starts with a swift overview of ASP's historical origins in CGI and a look at Microsoft's earlier and less successful forays into page serving.

But ASP 3.0 is far more than a way to create Web pages dynamically: It's a way of enabling Web pages to act as the client interface to Netserver-based applications despite the Net's stateless nature. Moving from familiar connected client/server applications to disconnected Web based applications requires new theoretical models and the authors spend a lot of time explaining these. Basically, ASP is a collection of technologies and further effort goes into explaining how these technologies relate: How ADO relates to ODBC, for example, and how it extends ODBC to encompass access to any type of data store, such as Exchange Server and LDAP. Visual Basic 5 is the glue which holds these disparate pieces together and the authors assume their readers are accomplished VB programmers, though other languages are discussed.

Tying together software technologies moving at different paces, such as XML and scripts, COM, ADO 2.5, OLE DB and RDS isn't straightforward. The authors provide plenty of examples showing you what works and how to get around the bits that don't. There's no denying Professional ASP 3.0 is complex but this book makes it comprehensible. --Steve Patient

Synopsis
This work is about Active Server Pages 3.0, as included with Windows 2000. However, because ASP is now a core part of so many Web-oriented features within Windows, this book sets out to cover a wider area than just how ASP works. ASP is maturing all the time to encompass more integration with other Windows services and software, and so there are many other areas that impinge directly on the use and performance of ASP.

From the Publisher
Online discussion of the topics in this book available at Wrox's P2P site

Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 is the next edition of the number one selling ASP book in the world; Professional Active Server Pages 2.0. This is a next edition covering all the new features that appear as part of Win2000 but it is also a completely new book in terms of content, recycling essentially nothing from the previous edition. Instead all the concepts are taken a step further for a more mature audience and ASP is considered in terms of an N-tier enterprise environment including extensive coverage of components, Index Server, ADO 2.5, XML, CDO, ADSI, and much more.

Customer Reviews

broad scope, good detail
This is the second ASP book you should buy. Try something lightweight first, like a SAMS 21 days thingy, to get the hang of the basics of objects like response, request etc. Otherwise you could well glaze over and watch telly instead .. some of the detail is certainly betond beginner standard. Personally, reading this book, I've gone from cocky to humble and back to cocky again. Its taught me many things I should have known but didn't. Sure there are errata; show me a web book that doesn't have mistakes and I'll keel over in a faint. This book is money well spent. Period.

One of the best ASP books. From some experiance upwards.
Very good purchase. It wont teach you from scratch - try "ASP for Dummies", but will take you far after that.

Falls over in some places - related information isnt always grouped together and seems to forget differences in DB access (between Access and SQL for example).

Other than that it provided a real _wealth_ of information. It certainly deserves to be on any serious web-dev desk.

Useful - not for beginners!
I have both this book and Beginning ASP 3.0. If you're a beginner DEFINITELY start with the former book; with little knowledge of what ASP is this book is over your head from the first page. The only complaint i have about this book is that the object reference in ASP In A Nutshell is way better in structure and refer-ability, so I bought that one too - my pocket is very light at the moment!