ASP Internals

Rating:
Summary: The view of ASPs from underneath
Review: A few years ago, I started an introductory course in Active Server Pages and wrote my own instructional material. Although it has always gone well, until now, I had never made the attempt to get deep under the hood and examine what is happening behind the scenes. It always seemed that delving into the C++ code would be a low Return On Investment (ROI) operation. When I first received this book, I read the blurbs and was somewhat skeptical. However, once I started, the reading was completed in less than a day, and the ROI was rather high.
It was gratifying to learn that some of the implementations were as I had always suspected. The basics of underlying data transfer are thoroughly introduced and several of the points made in the book will be incorporated into the next rewrite of my ASP material. While it does help to understand C++, particularly Visual C++, it is not an absolute requirement.
I learned more about the underlying mechanics of IIS and ASPs in the reading of this book than I have in over six sessions of a class where students and I always tinker with the code. If you have more than a passing interest in coding ASPs, then this is a book that will be of enormous value in learning how things are executed. The knowledge will also help you understand some of those infuriatingly cryptic errors.

Rating:
Summary: Rushed and incomplete
Review: After reading this book, I was very disappointed. The author seemed hurried and the book felt incomplete. While I think the aspirations of this book were high, I have to question the usefulness of the content of this book.

Rating:
Summary: yeah, yeah
Review: Come on you bad reviewers. This book is pretty good. No, it's not end to end ASP Internals, but IIS isn't open source either. Interesting and informative coverage of SOME aspects of ASP. Transaction coverage is particuarly good.

Rating:
Summary: yeah, yeah
Review: Come on you bad reviewers. This book is pretty good. No, it's not end to end ASP Internals, but IIS isn't open source either. Interesting and informative coverage of SOME aspects of ASP. Transaction coverage is particuarly good.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Good Resource To Know Pseudo Implementation of ASP
Review: I found the book to be a very good resource to see pseudo implementation of ASP. The explanation is as good as real inside impelementation of ASP. This is book is not about samples on how to use ASP to write your web pages. It is more about how ASP works.

Rating:
Summary: Update to a previous review
Review: I was very disappointed with this book. As a heavy-duty ASP programmer, the subject seemed very interesting and relevant, but the book was quite a let down.

There was nothing terribly deep here. I was hoping that we might learn about how ASP works as a very high bandwidth service, but all we learn is very straightforward info that is more or less obvious to anyone with COM and IIS experience. True, there was some discussion of Microsoft's continued use of undocumented interfaces (!) that is probably not findable anywhere else, but these tended to be minutiae of how ASP works.

Since the theme of the book is the ASP clone that Flanders wrote, you'd think the source code would be available somehow. There are lots of excerpts in the text, but it would be nice to be able to see the whole thing somewhere - and perhaps even try to run it. But if this code is available somewhere, I couldn't find it.

The book is advertised as 212 pages, but in fact the text is a grand total of 123 whole pages - the font is large, and big margins....

The level of discourse was also very uneven. The first chapter was a first-level cut at how HTTP works, which I would hope would be blindingly obvious to the target audience for this book.

So kudos are in order for taking on a new and important topic - at least it wasn't yet another copy of publicly available documentation. But I wanted more.