Beginning ASP Databases

If you aren't familiar with Wrox Publishing (great books!), Wrox has a learning tree on the back of most of their books. It helps developers determine the appropriate path and books to read to learn a specific technology. As a developer, I can't stress the importance of this enough. I therefore feel it's important to suggest that while this is a Beginning ASP book, you should have some experience coding straight Active Server Pages (no database stuff) and if you like Wrox, I highly suggest Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0 or 3.0 (I reviewed 2.0 if you need help determining which version book to get). If I hadn't gone through Beginning ASP 2.0 before doing this book, I wouldn't have gotten as much out of it. This is because the author immediately dives in to ADO in Chapter 3, assuming you are ASP-ready!Having said that, this is a great book. I was familiar with Microsoft data access techniques (ADO, Jet, SQL language) and a little with ASP but I really needed a book to see how they all tied together. The author goes through SQL as does most any database book, but at least he uses it in the context of integrating with your ASP web pages. A great part of this book is showing how you would actually implement recordsets. In other words, he doesn't say "Here's how to bring back recordsets", he says "Here's how to bring back recordsets and display the information usefully in an ASP page". Cookies, Errors, Stored Procedures, and a full case study are all presented in later chapters. The case study was extremely helpful.One other thing I think you may find helpful-- don't feel left out if you are only developing on a workstation with no server right now. You can still use this book. Chapter 2 is dedicated solely to showing how you can work with this entire book using/installing Personal Web Server, IIS, ADO on any Microsoft operating system, including Windows 95/98, 2000, Or NT with no server involved.

I have been designing web pages for years and never really saw the point of using "Programming" in them for my purposes. I kew a bit of VB, so I just skipped the Begining ASP book and dove into this one. I spent about 40 hours with this book and used it cover to cover. I have never done that with a technical book before. The fact that John is a teacher is very evident in this book. There are very few mistakes and the structure is incredibly easy to follow. I followed all the examples and hand coded most everything rather than just using the prewritten code from the Wrox Site. I learned so much from the book that I couldn't help but to totally change my design methodology. Now when I am writing for an IIS server, I always use ASP. Databases are now integrated into almost all of my work. It's given me a completly new creative outlet.John has focused on good design practices while he explained the details of connecting to the databases and the methods of interacting with them. I didn't fully digest all of the methods of connecting with ADO, but I just applied his methods to similar work, and it all comes out nicely.This book focuses strongly on Access, but most of the scripting can be adapted to SQL server easily. All of the Server Side Scripting is done in VBScript and any Client Side is done in Javascript primarily for form validation. That's the standard method for most people, and it's not really confusing when you see it. You don't need to know ASP before using this book, but it would be helpful to have a good ASP reference available to you. I ran into a few situations where I wanted to do something a bit diferent from the book, and I got stuck becuase I didn't know the syntax for a command I wanted to use. I borrowed a co-worker's "Beginning ASP" a few times, but probably would have been better served with an something which had an index of commands. After reading this book, I immediately set out to do a fully database driven site for my company and they love it. I could easily take a job as a Web "Developer" now.If you are doing anything complex from an IIS server, whether it's maintaining records, using search capabilities, or just managing a large site, I highly reccomend this book. And ASP in general is very useful if only for the server side includes that can make your site so much easier to maintain.

I went from having zero knowledge about accessing databases using asp and VBscript to being able to customize my website with professionaly functioning web pages in a matter of 2 weeks. The book walks you through step by step instructions and examples quite like a professor would teach a class. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in learning this subject.

The missing link for ASP web developers who are ready for databases connectivity. You do not need to know ASP to benefit from this book. I did not. Using a simple format the author takes you from basic ASP installation, to building HTML forms which add, delete, and update information on your local DB server. Every word in the book is carefully worded so you never second guess the author's intentions. Things to note: The book's database and scripting focus is Access and VBscript. But It is easy to create the example DB tables in SQL Server - that's what I did. Download a single file from the WROX website and all of the working examples in the book are at your disposal. You don't waste any time figuring out coding problems, Instead your main focus is reviewing the code and analyzing how it worked so well. This book is better than any $1500 ASP training course. It is the single Web development resource which connects all of the pieces together for you. Thanks John!

This book is a great introduction to accessing databases using ASP. Data access is via ADO, and both Jet (MS Access) and SQL Server database examples are provided. In addition to just showing how to connect to a database through ASP, the book also shows many practical examples of when and why you would want to do so, and also provides a good case study illustrating an entire web application including such features as user logins, basic security, and cookies (as well as of course plenty of database access through ADO and dynamic asp pages).This book would be a good first book for a programmer wanting to learn ASP and ASP Database technology, as complete code samples and explanations are provided for all asp code given, but it is also a good follow up book to Beginning ASP (ver 3.0 is about to be released)(I was a member of the technical review team for this book, so I have read every word of the book and run every code sample.)