Teach Yourself Active Server Pages in 14 Days

Structurally sound. Example based. Well layed out. Teach Yourself Active Server Pages In 14 Days accomplishes it goal. The premise of the work is not to turn one into a programmer overnight, but to jump-start by example, those who have little experience with the Microsoft Active-X Component Object Model (COM). As an experienced programmer of 14 years and designer of a large corporate intranet, I feel this book provides a good baseline for the novice and the experienced professional. It even tackles some higher level techniques concerning (by example) OOP paradigms, variable passing and platform configuration. I bought it, use it, and reccommend it!

I bought this book because I needed something to get me up and running quickly. Although I found many of the examples to be not particularly practical for what I needed to accomplish, I have to say that overall, the book helped me to meet my objective which was to have a web site that connected to my SQL Server database without using CGI. In my environment, we are using the Microsoft suite of products such as Visual Interdev and SQL Server, so integrating the examples in house was not difficult, but for those not using these products, the examples will be difficult to implement. I had to "tweak" many of the examples to get them to work, so I would not recommend this book for beginners especially those with a limited knowledge of Access or SQL Server. I do reference this book quite often when I encounter problems, but finding solutions sometimes takes a good deal of searching through the book. The book is lacking on topics such as Server timeouts and Database timeouts which I have encountered frequently, but the solutions are provided within the text if you know what to look for. More practical examples of how to use the methods and properties would have enhanced this book greatly.

After reading this book, I found I still needed to know a lot more than what was taught. Although the book covers the basics, and I would agree, you can learn the basics of ASP in 14 days with this book, it was lacking in detail and didn't jump into the "heart" of ASP until a couple of chapters into the book. Let's face it: those who are learning ASP don't need to know about VBScript or the fundamentals of HTML forms. Therefore, I think that more of the content should have focused on ASP than on other topics. Although the VBScript reference at the end of the book is nice, if I wanted to learn VBS, I would have bought a book on VBS. Also, the book didn't cover databases (ADO) how I would have expected. It jumped into it too fast, and didn't cover anything other than MS Access databases. I would have liked at least a couple of pages on SQL: an SQL reference instead of a VBS reference would have made my day! All and all, the book wasn't so bad. Although, in my humble opinion, it covered some of the matter too quickly without going into detail, I still learned enough to use ASP. I would not recommend this book to anyone who knows VBScript or to anyone who wants to know everything about ASP. On the other hand, I would recommend it for those who need to learn ASP quickly and for small-scale projects. As a reference manual, it doesn't serve much of a purpose, and that is what was most disappointing.