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: Excellent Book
Review: Although I had an advanced degree in Computer Science all my project experience was in the field of non-web-based application development. So when I entered the web application development market I needed a fast paced book to teach me how to convert my skills from the usual database development to a web based one.
Although many online articles were helpful this book was the reason I understood many concepts.
Its a perfect book for a beginner but if you are already experienced in programming/databases this wouldn't be a bad place to start off web development in ASP (this is not ASP.NET).
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: 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: A well written book filling void in ASP Programming titles
Review: I decided to write my review, although I have not completed reading the whole book, because I am convinced more people should know about this book! It does fill the void left among the numerous ASP programming book with two major advantages - 1. It completely answers what the title of the book would have you expect - beginning ASP database programming; 2 - It does it in the most appropriate way - with very professional teaching style which still leaves the student dignity intact. One little remark - The author overall assumes that certain tasks (particularly the database security types) can be consulted with a DBA, and in my case, in the company I work for, there is no DBA . I believe the book would have benefited from having an appendix on the differences between NT vs. NT/SQL Server mixed type of security, but other than this, the book is just perfect! Finally, my sincere thank you to John Kauffman and Wrox for a very practical, extremely well written book which comes just in time to answer my professional prayers!
Rating:
Summary: Wrox Publishing Scores Again!
Review: If you aren't familiar with Wrox Publishing (great books!), Wrox has a learning tree on the back of most of their books. It helps developers determine the appropriate path and books to read to learn a specific technology. As a developer, I can't stress the importance of this enough. I therefore feel it's important to suggest that while this is a Beginning ASP book, you should have some experience coding straight Active Server Pages (no database stuff) and if you like Wrox, I highly suggest Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0 or 3.0 (I reviewed 2.0 if you need help determining which version book to get). If I hadn't gone through Beginning ASP 2.0 before doing this book, I wouldn't have gotten as much out of it. This is because the author immediately dives in to ADO in Chapter 3, assuming you are ASP-ready! Having said that, this is a great book. I was familiar with Microsoft data access techniques (ADO, Jet, SQL language) and a little with ASP but I really needed a book to see how they all tied together. The author goes through SQL as does most any database book, but at least he uses it in the context of integrating with your ASP web pages. A great part of this book is showing how you would actually implement recordsets. In other words, he doesn't say "Here's how to bring back recordsets", he says "Here's how to bring back recordsets and display the information usefully in an ASP page". Cookies, Errors, Stored Procedures, and a full case study are all presented in later chapters. The case study was extremely helpful. One other thing I think you may find helpful-- don't feel left out if you are only developing on a workstation with no server right now. You can still use this book. Chapter 2 is dedicated solely to showing how you can work with this entire book using/installing Personal Web Server, IIS, ADO on any Microsoft operating system, including Windows 95/98, 2000, Or NT with no server involved.
Rating:
Summary: Great Help
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: 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: A gem. Six stars! Should win the technical Pulizter prize.
Review: The missing link for ASP web developers who are ready for databases connectivity. You do not need to know ASP to benefit from this book. I did not. Using a simple format the author takes you from basic ASP installation, to building HTML forms which add, delete, and update information on your local DB server. Every word in the book is carefully worded so you never second guess the author's intentions. Things to note: The book's database and scripting focus is Access and VBscript. But It is easy to create the example DB tables in SQL Server - that's what I did. Download a single file from the WROX website and all of the working examples in the book are at your disposal. You don't waste any time figuring out coding problems, Instead your main focus is reviewing the code and analyzing how it worked so well. This book is better than any $1500 ASP training course. It is the single Web development resource which connects all of the pieces together for you. Thanks John!
Rating:
Summary: Perfect book for a Beginner or Intermediate Developer
Review: This book is not just for a beginner....I include intermediate ASP developers as well.
This book is perfect for a beginner though. It explains stuff in not too much detail but enough to understand the full explanation of how to do real-life transactions and a good bulk of what you need to know in Web Development. I'd say this book brings you to an intermediate level after you are done. The advanced levels come in when you start doing sessions and stuff like that.
What is really nice is that this guy knows what it is like to be a developer for a company and the pains you go through. His examples are examples I've been able to understand, therefore my knowledge of ASP at work becomes better and this is the reference book I use most.
He gives a nice list of common errors in ASP which can drive you nuts if you haven't really got down all the basics..and often you forget the simplest things. On p. 232, he lists each error and a brief description of why you could possibly be getting this...and he's right. If you get any of these errors, just whip out this page and save yourself 10-30 minutes or more of frustration with ASP.
Even though .NET is here, if you are still developing in ASP, this book may be old but the syntax hasn't changed so buy it if you can still get your hands on it!
The whole book is great....a must have for even an intermedate developer......and a great beginner book also.
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