Rating: 
Summary: Still worthwhile for learning ASP/ADO basics
Review: ... As of this date, the book is 4 years old, yet I'm finding the book valuable in learning how to create a small but complex web application using a straightforward ADO interface to an Access database. I don't need .Net for this project, and this book is making the whole thing pretty easy.The author is clearly a professional educator, but the book reveals he's also been paid to program using ASP and ADO. He remembers what that learning process is like and helps the reader get to the objective quickly without skipping crucial steps. With the index, you can use it as a reference manual, but when you choose to go through a chapter, the author makes it fun to read. The example code generally shows an awareness of how real business application professionals write code -- so that it will be clear, readable and maintainable. Hackers can think they can take shortcuts and that unreadable but compact code is cool, without being aware of the overall increase in the lifecycle cost of developing and maintaining an application. But this book encourages well-written code. It is a beginner's book, so in some cases run-time efficiencies could be improved, but generally the book points out when more efficient techniques could be used. It's still worth reading if you are interested in ASP and ADO.
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect Reference for New Developers not on the Leading Edge
Review: Let me put my review in perspective. I have been programming in one language or another for over twenty years. I was the project manager for a Fortune 500 company's e-commerce initiative. I do some consulting on the side. In other words, I consider myself to be a veteran programmer. As you know by now, most programming books fall into one of two categories: expert references, or trivial introductions. Wrox books fall somewhere in between. As a result, these books usually create some controversy over who should read them. I find them to be exactly what I need, and interesting enough to read from cover to cover. "Beginning ASP Databases" is nearly three years old at the time of this review, an absolute eternity in "Internet time." This book still provides an excellent foundation for novice-to-intermediate ASP programmers, especially those people who don't yet have access to Visual Studio .NET. It can even surprise the self-proclaimed "experts" every now and then. Despite the word "Beginning" in the title, the author presumes that the reader is familiar with HTML, ASP, as well as relational databases (RDBMS's). These assumptions are spelled out in the Introduction. Many people may choose to overlook this seemingly unimportant section, but Wrox does a good job of positioning their books here. You owe it to your pocketbook to read it first, if you can. Mr. Kauffman is a college professor, and the content of this book has been refined by his teaching the subject matter numerous times. His writing style is relaxed and easy to read. Along the way, he includes descriptions of those errors that are the most commonly-made by his students. I smiled to myself several times, knowing that I had made many of them, too. Each chapter includes exercises to support the text, and a quiz at the end. The answers are provided at the end of each chapter, which is a welcome feature compared to some of those college texts I read that just beat me up without letting me know if I was right or wrong. The author briefly mentions competing technologies, such as ColdFusion and PHP. He talks about third-party programs such as Chili!ASP that allow Active Server Pages to run on Apache Web servers, hosted on UNIX platforms. This global perspective was a welcome surprise, as most Wrox books are Microsoft-centric to a fault. The book shows its age when it comes to describing the installation of an ASP development environment under Windows NT Server, Windows 2000 Workstation/Server, as well as Personal Web Server on Windows 95/98. I will add that you can develop on Peer Web Services on Windows NT Workstation, as well as IIS 5.0 on Windows XP Professional. You won't be able to install PWS on Windows ME without first installing it on Windows 98 and suffering through an ugly upgrade, and I haven't tried Windows XP Home Edition. Contrary to what other reviewers have stated, ODBC is available in Windows XP, under the Control Panel's "Administrative Tools" applet. The author acknowledges that OLE DB is the more efficient provider to use. Aside from one example in Chapter Six, most of the code uses an ODBC connection. If you prefer to work with the native OLE DB provider, you can make suitable changes to each page, and everything will still work. I believe that using a system DSN is easier, and therefore is more appropriate for a "Beginning" title such as this one. Although I've worked with ADO recordsets seemingly thousands of times, I still appreciated the refresher. I especially needed to revisit the importance of cursors, and how they can affect a recordset's behavior. The "heavy lift" chapter of the book explains how to create HTML forms that add, modify, and delete data from a database. This functionality lies at the heart of Web-enabling a database. Even though I have coded my own pages to perform these tasks, I still benefited from reading someone else's approach. The book goes on to cover client-side cookies, when they can be helpful, and how to set them from server-side code. If you have encountered difficulty finding this information concisely explained in one location, then look no further. I believe that the quality of an application can be determined by the robustness of its error handling. Mr. Kauffman discusses the Error collection specifically, in addition to his advisory warnings and troubleshooting tips within each chapter. This information is invaluable to any new developer. More attention could have been paid to making error handling more portable by creating reusable functions, instead of coding it into each individual page. Stored Procedures are very interesting, as their judicious use can definitely improve the performance of a Web application. Every book that covers parameterized stored procedures always recommends creating the ADO objects in this order: Connection, Command, and then Parameter. This book is no exception. I prefer to build my Command object first, and then append the parameters before creating the connection. If the user has provided data of the wrong type, then I don't have to expend the valuable server resources to create a connection to the database. The last two sections cover more tips that the author learned from the school of hard knocks, as well as performance testing suggestions. Although some of the utilities that are mentioned are dated, the remainder of the information is still valuable for a developer of any experience. "Beginning ASP Databases" turns out to be an excellent resource that covers most of the functionality that is required to web-enable a database. It does not cover security, which is an aspect of database and application development that should always be kept in mind. Most of my criticisms center around my desire for additional information on topics that are rightly reserved for a "Professional" book. These objections aside, it is a ready asset to those who are new to Active Server Pages, and also provides many helpful suggestions to seasoned veterans.
Rating: 
Summary: Not well written
Review: In my opinion, this book isn't well written. The authors seem to talk about certain subjects before they even teach you what they are talking about. The book also likes to jump around. Even though this book isn't a total waste of money, it should explain in more detail certain subjects that the author should know, might be a little confusing to the reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book overall - coding style could be more efficient.
Review: I am somewhere between the level of beginning to intermediate in ASP programming. I found this book to be useful and easy to read for a beginner - for the most part. My biggest complaint about this book is that it teaches you how to code everything using the longest syntax possible! Everything is like written in long hand or something. The coding examples are definitely not the most efficient way to write ASP pages. I just followed the code exactly for Chapter 10 (SQL Statements to Modify Data) and did a similar write up using the techniques learned from my co-workers (who are advanced ASP developers) and found out that I could have written the same thing using half less code. The coding techniques used within a page are sometimes too repetitive - like building string values upon string values upon string values - just to derive to a single final result page. If you like doing massive concatenations - then this book is for you! The variables are declared and you end up using it like 100 times in the same page over and over. There are more efficient ways to write ASP pages. I think this is frustrating for a beginner because 1) you're more likely to make more mistakes when you have to type more 2) finding your mistakes in all the repetitive code makes it that more difficult and 3) you end up burning more valuable time - which was everything that I experienced. I'm not saying that I don't recommend this book - I do. I'm just saying that the coding style used could be more condensed and efficient. The plus side is that this book gives lots of good examples - again, if you like to do things the long way. I do like the Wrox series books - own 5 of them. I've had a chance to read a few chapters of Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 and I think I like that book much better - although a little more technical and less emphasis on ASP databases but straight to the point in coding style. Good luck and happy reading! :-)
Rating:
Summary: Excellent ASP introduction
Review: This is an amazing book. I initially purchased this book as a result of a client requiring a web site that needed database access. Although I did not read the entire book (807 pages, typical of Wrox publishing), the layout of the book is such that you can go in, find how to do a required task through it's very relevant examples, (ie. make a web form to delete values inside an Access database) and move on. Everything is covered, including the very basics of setting up a database with Microsoft IIS or PWS. This is a true 'Programmer To Programmer' book, as it doesn't hold your hand all the way through but assumes just the right amount of information for a normal programmer/developer. Another impressive fact about this book is its gentle introduction to more advanced topics such as SQL Server, COM/ActiveX objects, and stored procedures. I would highly recommend this book not just as a learn-to book, but also as a great ASP reference guide, due to the great organization of the book. Also recommended for anyone who has no clue what ASP is, but has some experience with databases and SQL.
Rating:
Summary: Super book for ASP beginners
Review: I bought this book about three years ago as I was starting on ASP. It was a tremendous help to me then because it was written in a friendly, reassuring manner--reassuring in the sense that if you missed something in earlier chapters, you would see similar code in later chaps perhaps being applied to a diff. solution. For a beginner, that's important because it reinforces the syntax(at least that's how I learnt). Three months after I bought the book I loaned it to a fellow programmer at my company...which in hindsight was a mistake because she has refused to return the book even though I've requested it a number of times...Yes, this MUST mean it is a good book! :) After you get thru w/ this book, check out a couple more excellent books on ASP--Teach Youself E-Commerce Programming with ASP by Stephen Walther.
Or if you prefer to move on to the "new and improved" ASP.Net, there are two books that I particularly like--Beginning ASP.Net E-Commerce by Christian Darie and Karli Watson (Wrox), and ASP.Net Kickstart by Stephen Walther. Happy learning.
Rating:
Summary: Great Help
Review: I found this book to be extremely useful since it provides the WHOLE solution to sample situations, i.e., both the ASP code and the SQL/Access code. So you are provided a complete view of the processing. I am always using situations out of this book as a basis for solving my own application issues. Very helpful.
Rating:
Summary: A good beginner's ASP book
Review: If you understand who this book is for, you'll get a lot of use out of it. It's for people who've worked with HTML and have some familiarity with programming concepts, working with databases, and VBA. If this describes you, you'll be up and running with ASP database application programming in a remarkably short period of time. Of course, once you've mastered the very basic examples in this book, you'll probably want to pick up an actual ASP reference to help you get beyond the basics. I think of this book as more of a quick-start guide than anything else.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: When I started to read this book, I have only the knowledge that a user of Microsoft FrontPage may have: Very little HTML. I had zero VBS programming experience and I had some SQL. I am beginning Chapter 12 and I am already creating very impressive ADO/ASP web applications at my job's intranet. This book is an excellent place to start learning ASP.
Rating:
Summary: Developer's bible
Review: This book is excellent in information, and in presentation. Easy to read, and very organized with excellent resource appendices. But most of all, there are updates and downloads from [a]website, with oustanding forums, discussions and chat with others. Got questions? This is where the moderators and other participants help you find them. I have found that there are some WebServers who recommend this book as references for their developers. This is just one of a family. This will become your bible.
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