Essential Asp for Web Professionals (The Prentice Hall Essential Web Professional Series)

by Elijah Lovejoy

Paperback: 298 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
ISBN: 0130304999; 1st edition (November 2000)

Although at least half as long as other titles on the subject, Essential ASP for Web Professionals is probably just as valuable for getting started with ASP. Aimed at the beginning or intermediate Web developer, this is an extremely useful, cookbook-style tutorial that helps readers of all levels use ASP (and JavaScript) to create Web pages dynamically by concisely offering a series of simple, effective ASP examples. The full source code is included, along with extensive annotations and suggestions for extending the code in custom projects. This approach is ideal for anyone who appreciates a hands-on approach to learning.

The examples themselves are immediately practical. First off, a date-time script and an example gives out a random "tip of the day" read from a text file on the server. Then it's on to basic database programming with ADO and ASP. After a quick tour of database basics, readers learn some expert techniques for generating forms based on any database table without changing ASP code. (Not only will you be able to easily generate HTML forms on the fly, you'll also find out how to update databases from forms automatically, again without changing ASP code.) This flexible, "soft" approach to working with databases will help you write ASP code that's a lot easier to maintain.

The book culminates in a full-featured shopping cart example for an e-commerce site. Techniques demonstrated include maintaining state with cookies. Throughout, the book does a fine job of showing how ASPs often work together to get the job done, instead of creating monolithic (and unmaintainable) scripts. For instance, the shopping cart example uses no less than 11 ASP files. (A quick "site map" diagram shows the organization.) Besides the basics, Essential ASP also offers a guide to some best practices, ensuring you'll learn the right way to do things, as well as pick up the basics quickly.

Efficiently packaged, yet filled with some very useful code, this is a truly worthwhile tutorial for ASP development that's exactly what the busy Web professional needs to get started with this powerful standard.

Topics covered in Essential Asp for Web Professionals:
• Example-based ASP programming tutorial
• Introduction to Active Server Pages (ASP) created with JavaScript
• Programming with JavaScript date and time functions
• Working with text files
• Introduction to databases
• Tables and records
• Writing form data to text files (using ADO with ASP) and data-driven Web pages
• Editing, updating, and deleting database records
• Techniques and tips for building data-driven forms
• Implementing an e-commerce shopping cart with ASP (complete sample code and programming tips)
• Managing sessions with cookies
• Sending e-mail with CDONTS and ASP
• Short reference guide to JavaScript

From Book News, Inc.: Teaches Web developers how to build sites and applications with Microsoft's ASP and JavaScript. Practical coverage is built around real-world examples, downloadable from the Web. Offers practical overviews of key ASP and JavaScript features, and covers areas such as basics of embedding ASP code in HTML pages, database application development, editing records, and building a shopping cart. Lovejoy has six years of experience developing Internet and database applications.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR

Book Info (Prentice Hall PTR. World Association of Webmasters): A compact, example-rich guide for Web developers, teaching exactly the skills needed to build dynamic Web sites and applications with Microsoft's ASP and JavaScript. Filled with real-world examples, practical overviews of key concepts, usable code, and other quick solutions. Softcover. DLC: Internet programming.

From the Inside Flap: Introduction Welcome to the book.

This is an ASP cookbook. Each chapter contains one or more recipes that work together in a useful way. Briefly:
Chapter 1 is basically a tutorial, with a couple of very simple scripts that add dates to HTML pages.
Chapter 2 has two recipes: a tip-of-the-day application (a quick and dirty way to add dynamic content to a Web page) and a guest book.
Chapter 3 has a complicated recipe for publishing the contents of a database onto a Web site.
Chapter 4 has a more complicated recipe that creates a Web site that lets you edit the database.
Chapter 5 has a recipe for a shopping cart. It's the most complicated recipe in this book and the one that's most likely to make you some bucks.
Chapter 6 gets simple again with a recipe for e-mail.

All of these recipes rely on Active Server Pages (ASP) and JavaScript, which is mostly what this introduction is about.Before Active Server Pages

Tim Berners-Lee started things off with a great way to publish documents called HTML, which is a wonderful way to publish static documents.

Pretty quickly thereafter, something called CGI was added to Web servers to let programmers generate HTML pages on the fly. With CGI, when the Web server gets a request for page, it starts a program and hands the request to the program. If the program generates any output, that output is returned to the browser...

From the Back Cover:
* Get results from ASP with server-side JavaScript-today!
* Learn from practical real-world examples with downloadable reusable code
* Key techniques-quick, clear, and handy!
* Build shopping carts, guest books, and other applications
* Database integration, e-mail processing, and much more

This compact, example-rich guide teaches Web developers exactly what they need to know to build great dynamic sites and applications with Microsoft's ASP and JavaScript, the world's #1 Web scripting language. Endorsed by the World Organization of Webmasters, Essential ASP for Web Professionals offers no-nonsense, practical coverage built around real-world examples on a live sample Web site. Every chapter includes real-world overviews of key ASP and JavaScript features, reinforcing what you've learned and demonstrating how to adapt it quickly to your own applications. From the basics of embedding ASP code in HTML pages to full-blown database application development, this book delivers practical answers, usable code, and real solutions—fast!

Use ASP and JavaScript to do all this, and more!
* Deliver dynamic content on any Web or intranet site
* Create database applications that publish content and enable users to edit it
* Build shopping carts, guest books, and other applications
* Send e-mail automatically from your Web pages
* Embed dates and other variable data in your pages
* Request and check user passwords

Look to Essential Books for ALL the Web Skills You Need! All these books share the same great format and similar Web sites containing downloadable code-so once you've used one, learning from the others is a piece of cake!

* Essential CSS and DHTML for Web Programmers
* Essential Flash 4 for Web Programmers
* Essential Perl 5 for Web Professionals
* Essential Photoshop for Web Designers
* Essential JavaScript for Web Programmers
* Essential PHP for Web Professionals
* Essential Flash 5 for Web Professionals, Essential Design for Web Professionals, and more coming soon!

About the Author: ELIJAH LOVEJOY has more than six years' experience developing Internet and database applications; his clients have included the American Film Institute and the Environmental Protection Agency. He is currently Chief Technology Officer for Prepay.

Customer Reviews
Great ASP book for JavaScripters, December 6, 2001
Reviewer: jared from Columbus, OH United States
This was the only book I could find that focused ONLY on ASP written in JavaScript. So I crossed my fingers and hoped it was good. I was not at all disappointed.

***You will not learn JavaScript in this book!*** It is after all an ASP book, not a JS book. If, however, you already know JavaScript (at least the basic concepts), it's great. It gives you just enough information without overexplaining. The examples are nicely laid out and based on REAL WORLD problems (the likes of which I was/am dealing with).

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book at all. It can be easily read on the bus to/from work in a not many days (how I did it) and is not at all dry...or too *cute* either.

If you want to make ASP work for you in a variety of circumstances and are already familiar with JavaScript, this is the book for you. Best for ASP newbies who want a quick start.

Compact and helpful. Only examples but full of hints., October 30, 2001
Reviewer: Kien CaoXuan from Australia
I bought this book because I needed to know what ASP was and what it could do for me. I am pretty good with JavaScript and this book is the only one which combines ASP and JavaScript. All other ASP books only deal with VBScript.

One for the good-old JavaScripters!

I agree it may be only a cut-and -paste thing, but while you cut-and paste you also see how things work. I since have created many compact, stable and useful codes using ideas and excerpts from the examples in this book.

From the simple guest book to shopping cart to database access, all are there for you to dissect and learn. No lengthy discussions on stupid things like the history of the internet, how JavaScript was named after Java, how MS Jscript was a copy of JavaScript ,etc, etc,...Without these useless information, the book is small but full of stuffs! I got the guest book code working on my ASP personal site in one hour!

Very practical, very useful and yet very "light". I paid for the book and I liked it! I'll by Lovejoy's next ASP book when it came out...

Disappointed, July 10, 2001
Reviewer: A reader from Boston, MA United States
They say if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day. This book let's you eat for a day. If you're just looking to copy and paste without any real understanding of what you're doing, you may get something out of this book. If you want to be able to write ASP on your own, you won't like this book. I would suggest "Sams Teach Yourself Active Server Pages 3.0 in 21 Days", an excellent resource. Also, checkout msdn.microsoft.com.

Very Pleased With My Purchase : ), February 24, 2001
Reviewer: Jon Reade from Telford, Shropshire United Kingdom
I liked this book - not one for absolute beginners to ASP, nor does it claim to be, but for a seasoned developer with a Visual Basic background, I found it very helpful in giving me the 'bunk-up' into understanding ASP without wallowing through 300 pages of explanations of 'if..then...else' and loops. Lots of practical, to the point, ***useful***, real-world (rather than 'Hello World') examples to get you off to a flying start with a new technology. I liked the way the code examples are line-numbered, with an explanation following line-by-line what each part of the code does, so you can easily skip the explanations of the parts you already understand - why don't more authors do this? Also has a very good companion website with all the code from the book (thus keeping the price down as there's no CD to tax...:) ), and the latest errata. Highly recommended.

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