Teach Yourself Active Server Pages in 24 Hours

By Manohar Kamath
August 21, 1999

When I first saw this title, I thought it was such a ridiculous title - how can anyone learn ASP in 24 hours?! At that time I did not know the author was Christoph Wille, the author of "Unlocking ASP", which was one of the first books on ASP in the market. Christoph's name lends a lot of credibility to ASP books; I have known him as a Microsoft MVP, something that says the person knows the developers' needs first-hand.

Now that I have gone through the book, I really wish this book came out a little over 2 years back when ASP was just catching on. My guide was Wrox's "Professional Active Server Pages," an excellent book on ASP. However, Christoph's latest book is in a whole new perspective. Instead of going over each and every aspect of ASP, the book organizes learning into twenty four, one-hour tutorials. This organization really works.

The book opens with a chapter on installing the necessary software for ASP and creating the first ASP page. The best part of the chapter was "Processing Active Server Page Request" that describes what happens when a browser requests an ASP page. Very cool!

The second chapter introduces IIS/PWS and a host of web development technologies that are alternatives to ASP. The third chapter is where the fun begins where we see what ASP is, the ASP intrinsic objects and the scripting languages for ASP. The chapter gives a quick overview of VBScript, the language the book uses throughout.

Hour 4 - hour 8 is where a beginner has to pay attention, as these lessons form a foundation for your pretty much anything you do in ASP. I should commend the authors for organizing these chapters very well. Instead of having topics like "Request Object" or "Response Object," the authors use a more intuitive nomenclature such as "Getting data from the user" and "Sending data to the user."

The chapters on databases is just excellent - they cover data access basics, stored procedures, "paging" results, updating tables, etc. The chapter "Data access basics" is the best introduction to data access with ASP I have read to date.

The chapter on XML is short but gives a very good introduction to XML and XSL. Adding XML to an ASP book has a valid reason - XML is the technology of the future and a great data-exchange format.

The last chapter, in fact a project, on creating a web store goes through both design and implementation of a shopping cart using ASP and XML. While this project is not big, beginners will definitely like the concept of a project design and then translating it into code.

I highly recommend this book to any ASP beginner. The book covers the entire foundation of creating ASP applications in a short time without skipping important information. The best thing is the price - for about twenty bucks, this book is really a steal!

What's good:

• The organization is great! The chapter names read more like a FAQ (e.g. sending mail from ASP) from newsgroups. This format makes it easier to master ASP.

• The chapter "Tuning your ASP applications" is a welcome one. Although you can get these tips from various sources, to have them all in one place is so handy.

• One of the highlights is that the book uses a lot of SQL Server 7 examples to illustrate database access. This is a welcome feature as most beginner books use Access database.

• The book is interspersed with tips that strengthen readers' concepts.

What's not:

• I felt, since the book is targeted toward beginners, that a chapter on "ASP coding guidelines" could have been included. This way, the beginners are not only taught a technology but some good programming practices - things like naming conventions, programming constructs, etc.

• The chapter on XML could have been substituted by more chapters on ADO (disconnected records, etc.). But then the last chapter, a project on creating a web store, involves XML and hence justified.

Authors
Christoph Wille
Christian Koller

Related Links

• Read a sample chapter from the book

• Interview with Christoph Wille