Professional Active Server Pages 3.0 (Programmer to Programmer) Book

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 PatientRead More