Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 - Softcover

Anderson, Richard; Etc.; Blexrud, Chris; Chiarelli, Andrea; Denault, Dan; Esposito, Dino; Et Al

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861002610 ISBN 13: 9781861002617

Publisher: WROX Press Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

This work is about Active Server Pages 3.0, as included with Windows 2000. However, because ASP is now a core part of so many Web-oriented features within Windows, this book sets out to cover a wider area than just how ASP works. ASP is maturing all the time to encompass more integration with other Windows services and software, and so there are many other areas that impinge directly on the use and performance of ASP.

About this title

Review

At over 1,200 pages, Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 is an interesting and informative-- though not a light--read. It starts with a swift overview of ASP's historical origins in CGI and a look at Microsoft's earlier and less successful forays into page serving.

But ASP 3.0 is far more than a way to create Web pages dynamically: It's a way of enabling Web pages to act as the client interface to Netserver-based applications despite the Net's stateless nature. Moving from familiar connected client/server applications to disconnected Web based applications requires new theoretical models and the authors spend a lot of time explaining these. Basically, ASP is a collection of technologies and further effort goes into explaining how these technologies relate: How ADO relates to ODBC, for example, and how it extends ODBC to encompass access to any type of data store, such as Exchange Server and LDAP. Visual Basic 5 is the glue which holds these disparate pieces together and the authors assume their readers are accomplished VB programmers, though other languages are discussed.

Tying together software technologies moving at different paces, such as XML and scripts, COM, ADO 2.5, OLE DB and RDS isn't straightforward. The authors provide plenty of examples showing you what works and how to get around the bits that don't. There's no denying Professional ASP 3.0 is complex but this book makes it comprehensible. --Steve Patient

From the Publisher

Online discussion of the topics in this book available at Wrox's P2P site

Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 is the next edition of the number one selling ASP book in the world; Professional Active Server Pages 2.0. This is a next edition covering all the new features that appear as part of Win2000 but it is also a completely new book in terms of content, recycling essentially nothing from the previous edition. Instead all the concepts are taken a step further for a more mature audience and ASP is considered in terms of an N-tier enterprise environment including extensive coverage of components, Index Server, ADO 2.5, XML, CDO, ADSI, and much more.

Edition details

• Publisher: WROX Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1861002610
• ISBN 13: 9781861002617
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1200