Professional ADO RDS Programming with ASP

By Manohar Kamath
March 26, 1999

Wrox press continues its tradition of producing quality books with their latest offering on ASP and RDS. I not only enjoyed this book very much, but also could put what the book to work right away. This kind of reminded me of their "Professional Active Server Pages" book when it first came out.

The book covers two things mainly - ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) and RDS (Remote Data Service). RDS is a subset of Microsoft's Universal Data Access (UDA) strategy that lets developers connect to remote databases and work with the results locally. RDS runs on any ActiveX client, including Internet Explorer browser, making it easier to build a true 2-tier or even a 3-tier application on the Internet.

The book starts off with an excellent work on ADO 2.0. I can not say this enough, as for the first time I have seen such a treatment on ADO. The book covers each ADO object in detail, and sometimes even devoting more than one chapter to it. My favorite chapter(s) was on RecordSet object where the authors have put a lot of effort in bringing out the latest features in ADO. You too will be impressed by the topics as "Disconnected RecordSets" and "Custom RecordSets."

The book then moves on to RDS explaining the RDS's architecture and object model.It then looks at building RDS COM servers that encapsulate business logic to enhance the already powerful RDS's functionality. A very good chapter on DHTML and how the elements interact with RDS is not to be missed.

The next two chapters deal with Oracle database in relation to ASP. Although I did not carefully go through these chapters (I haven't worked on Oracle databases as much as Access or SQL Server), I found the section "Oracle Pitfalls (and how to avoid them)" very interesting. Being a consultant requires that you know some caveats when working on different database platforms. I have worked on DB2 for some time, and I realize some things you do one database are different from the things you do on a different one.

The book wraps up with ADO, RDS and Oracle reference and some troubleshooting tips.

What's good:

• Excellent coverage on ADO with great examples. All the examples I tried out worked the first time.
• The authors say the book is for intermediate to high level programmers, but I disagree. If you are even a beginner, you will find the chapters on ADO to be great. Many other books approach ADO from a "how-to" perspective, but this one dissects each component and explains them with examples.
• The treatment of RecordSet object is just excellent. Sometimes I think if it's the ADO 2.0 Recordset object which is great or it's the authors making it look that way. Beginners, this is a topic you need to know.
• The writing style is very easy and light, without assuming reader knows too much.

What's Not:

I have to be fair here. Despite the book's greatness, I found some shortcomings:

• Too little of RDS. I would like to see more chapters devoted to this topic. Especially, more on business objects and their interaction with IE.
• Not much discussion on RDS error handling. I have searched a whole lot on this topic everywhere, and I thought this book would handle it, but it just mentions it in one page. The client-side RDS error handling would be a great thing to have. On second thoughts, I wonder if Microsoft ever put a decent error handling into RDS.
• The discussion on Oracle databases could have been left out. When it comes to ADO, there are a variety of databases people use, so covering one database could have been avoided. It's my assumption (correct me if I am wrong) is that most ASP developers go with a Microsoft database like Access, Fox Pro or SQL server, so I think a wider audience was missed for these chapters. However, there is nothing wrong with the chapters themselves.
• Poor index. We could do with a better index, but if you know ADO already, you probably won't use this as much.

Authors
Matt Brown
Charles Caison
John Papa
Peter DeBetta
Eric Wilson

Paperback, 500 pages (1999)
ISBN: 1861001649
Wrox Press

Related Books
* ADO 2.1 programmer's reference
* Building distributed applicationss with ADO

Related Articles
NONE

Related Sites
* Microsoft's ADO/RDS page