Sams Teach Yourself Active Server Pages in 24 Hours

Rating:
Summary: What a dissappointment!
Review: After purchasing the same series book for Javascript 1.3, I was eager to breeze through this book as I had with the other. This book has no fluency and you will NOT know ASP in 24 hours. There are several different ways to complete tasks using ASP and the code given is the most confusing and difficult to follow imaginable. Learn from my mistake, stick with WROX.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly Written
Review: Although I've enjoyed two prior Sams books, this one was extremely disappointing. It lacked support or explanation for the examples given, had very little transition from chapter to chapter and concept to concept, and seemed extremely dated (one of the examples was to calculate the amount of time until the year 2000).

Rating:
Summary: A great beginner's guide to ASP
Review: An excellent guide for the beginner! Very good step-by-step setup instructions for setting up a web server on Windoze 95/98/NT. Good introduction to VBScript and excellent examples. And the publisher saves you money by NOT including a CD-ROM, which is most often useless with other books.

Very highly recommended to beginners.

Rating:
Summary: Missing Pages
Review: Dear Sir,

I have just returned from the US of A . I bought the book "Sams Teach Yourself Active Server Pages in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself in 24 Hours Series). " from there.

there are 12 crucial pages missing in the 3rd chapter of the book.I could have sent you the book back for replacement but due to the heavy cost involved in sending it to you through courier I am sorry my budget would not allow that. Also the Indian "custom department" is such that they would open it and chances are that the defective book might not even reach you.

I would appreciate if you could look into the matter and pass it to the author and the printing press at the earliest and see what can be done I am working on a project which has to be completed by 31st January else I will have to undergo losses.

My address:

Mohit Sippy B-9/11 Vasant Vihar New Delhi 110057 INDIA

Tel: [phone]

An early response would be highly appreciated.

Thank You,

Mohit Sippy Email: [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: ASP in 24 Hours (Provided you are running NT!)
Review: Despite the minimum requirements including Windows 95 / 98. This book is unuseable unless you are running Windows NT. Half way through chapter 1 the author says "I made a decision for you - you are using IIS or PWS/NTW". An leaves you facing a brick wall wondering what to do next! This is one of the worst books I have ever read (and I'm an old hack!).

Rating:
Summary: not for absolute beginners
Review: First of all, this book claims it's for beginners. Well, that's only a partial fact. Yes, I agree this is for "beginners in ASP", but it's not for absolute beginners on web development. That's why it disappoints so many readers. HTML and some background in scripting programming(not neccessarily means VB Script) is a must to understand this book, and some SQL will definitely help too.

Another problem with this book is that it can't explain the ASP concepts well. The first half of the book is dealing with the ASP basics ( not database access ), and the author do a really bad job on it. I can only get a rough idea on ASP's six basic objects. As for how to use it, I am not sure. Then the author did a better job in explaining how to connect ASP to database, but if you don't know SQL, you will not like those chapters too.

Therefore, if you don't really need to be an expert on ASP, this book is fine for you since it's much cheaper than most ASP books in the market. Otherwise, go to Wrox pub ASP books, they did a much better job than this one.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book for beginners who want to leran ASP
Review: I am a seasoned Web devloper and graphics desginer who wanted to learn ASP. The best book I've found were Professional Active Server Pages 2.0 from Wrox publication and this book. Wrox book is fantastic but is too hard to grasp if you are an ASP beginner. That is why I bought this book. I think Sams ASP in 24 hours is an excellent book. I've bought/read several 21 days/24 hours book but most of them were so-so. But this one is great especially for beginners. I would recommend it if you are trying to learn ASP. (go buy the Wrox book 'afterwards' if you want to learn ASP in more detail).

Rating:
Summary: A concise guide for beginners - a reference title for pro's
Review: I am a self-taught programmer who learned various programming languages by reading books, magazines and - most importantly - source code from others (also referred to as "learning by stealing"). With this tactics, I have earned the MCSE, MCSD, MCP-IT and CNA titles so far; not too bad for reading only. My support for the online ASP community has earned me the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for ASP, which I'm very proud of.

This book serves two purposes - to get beginners started with examples they can use in real life now, as well as serving the purpose of the #1 reference for the then advanced programmer. My co-author and I have put a heavy emphasis on readability, step-by-steps and background information you don't get anywhere else - we have put all our knowledge (I'm working on IIS since its 1.0 beta version) into this book.

You are learning about the basics, the tricks of the trade, database access for dynamic web pages, a shot of XML in the server-side environment, security guidelines for today's web servers, shopping solutions and various ways on how to extend the reach of ASP. Explore the possibilities step-by-step and come back later to re-use the code in your real-life applications.

Rating:
Summary: xxx
Review: I bought this book because of the reviews on this site. This book turned out to be more advanced than expected. If you are going to buy this book, make sure you know HTML, some JavaScript, basic SQL, and VBScript. Through the examples I was able to pick up the SQL and VBScript knowledge with a fair amount of effort. The thing I liked about this book was that it stuck to the topic at hand. Lots of other computer books stray far away from their topics. Several times in the book the authors said...that a certain topic was beyond the scope of the book and if you want more info look elsewhere. Another nice thing about this book was that you can complete 75% of the examples using free downloadable software (MS Personal Web Server). On the other hand, the IIS/NT Server topics were over my head. You will learn a lot if you type in all of the sample code and try to follow along with the examples. On the downside, this book seemed to skip from topic to topic without any real transition.

Rating:
Summary: Worst technical book I've ever read
Review: I did manage to learn ASP despite how poorly written this book is. However, it's overtly apparent that this book is written by people who speak English as a second language. It seems there was no copy editor.

If you don't mind ambiguous sentences and code examples that don't work then perhaps you'll learn something from this book. Otherwise, STAY AWAY! You'll be swearing at every page.

I wish I could have chosen zero stars for this review.