Special Edition Using ISAPI [With *]

I was so appalled with the one and two star reviews for this book that I just had to write my own review. I gave this book a five star because it used a tutorial approach with its examples to instruct and teach this difficult subject. With a little tweaking I could get the examples to work. Getting an ISAPI to work from barebones, without the extra heavy weight of MFC was in itself worth five stars. If you are going to do ISAPI with MFC, don't waist your time, use ASP. Get this book and kiss MFC goodbye. In December 1996, I went on a consultant interview for a C/C++ Web Application job. The client needed an authentication program to support a member base over 100,000 that could get over 10,000 hits at once (that was in 1997). And he needed this application within two weeks. At the time, I knew very little about the Internet and nothing about ISAPI programming. As always, Microsoft had a lot of disjoint information on ISAPI programming but not a comprehensive, tutorial approach for someone with a small learning time frame. With "Using ISAPI", I learn the basics of HTTP/HTML/ISAPI, how to setup a Web server, and how to interface with MSSQL database using ODBC all within two weeks. I was able to do this because of the comprehensive tutorial approach of the examples used in the book. Once you understand and can setup a basic template Filter or Application ISAPI, there is no stopping you. By the way, the ISAPI is still running and has never bought down the Server. It is my understanding that Microsoft's Web programming team still use ISAPI!

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.