If you are new to programming, want to learn, and want to have fun while you're at it, then this is the book for you. Teaching the major principles of programming in ASP with game programming examples, this user-friendly book is a truly unique learning tool. As you learn to program simple games with ASP, you will acquire the programming skills that you need for more serious applications and will learn how these skills can be put to use in real world scenarios.

Review

Active Server Pages (ASP) is the standard way of doing server-side scripting under Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). ASP offers tight interaction with Microsoft database servers, and isn't as hard to learn as you might think. With a good book at your side--ASP Programming for the Absolute Beginner is one--you can expect to be doing simple ASP work within an hour, and elaborate projects within a few days of experimentation. Progress along the learning curve requires only an open mind and a bit of diligence, as well as some careful guidance from someone who knows both ASP and the requirements of its typical users.

As the title of this book implies, it's meant for someone who's just getting going with ASP, and who in fact has chosen ASP as their first programming language. For that reason, John Gosney doesn't just show how conditional statements are implemented in ASP. He also explains why you'd want a conditional statement in the first place. Readers also learn about related subjects, such as HTML form syntax. Not all the information is elementary: There are full tutorials on connecting to Active Data Objects (ADO) databases and formulating SQL queries. The approach seems to work nicely, on the logic that assuming too little is better than assuming too much. Most programmers will be able to learn all they need to know for most ASP projects from this book. --David Wall

Topics covered: All about Active Server Pages (ASP), from square one (installing IIS 5) to the intermediate level (connecting to databases, executing queries, and presenting the results nicely formatted). With several example games, the author illustrates ASP syntax, control structures, interaction with HTML forms, and connectivity to back-end databases.

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