Beginning ASP Databases

by John Kauffman, Kevin Spencer, Thearon Willis

Perfect Paperback: 825 pages
Publisher: Wrox Press Inc
ISBN: 1861002726; 1st edition (September 1999)

As a tutorial, Beginning ASP Databases offers an entry point to one of the most crucial aspects of Microsoft-oriented Web development--database integration with Active Server Pages. In Beginning ASP Databases, a trio of authors covers the basics of working with databases from ASP--especially using ActiveX Database Objects (ADO).

The book is quite substantive in content but is written in a somewhat light-hearted style that makes readers new to the technology comfortable. The authors begin with a discussion of the benefits of ASP and ADO, and then explain how to configure the technology on the various flavors of Windows. From there, they show how to access databases using ADO, demystify how it all works, and focus on several key areas, including debugging, SQL, and stored procedures.

Plenty of code examples are included, and each is captioned with step-by-step explanations. Exercises and quizzes also complement the material. Throughout the book the authors identify some quite useful techniques to employ and traps to watch for--nuggets of knowledge that will set new ASP programmers on the right track. A lengthy case study ties it all together with a real-world example.

If you're planning on building Web sites on the Microsoft platform, ASP/ADO database access knowledge is essential. This fine guide offers an excellent way to get up to speed seamlessly.

Topics covered: ADO/OLE DB architecture, SQL, recordsets, databases and cookies, error handling, command object, stored procedures, irregular data handling, performance testing and tuning.

Book Description: Microsoft created Active Server Pages (ASP) to sew together a group of technologies for creating modern web sites, which can intelligently interact with the user at the front end and with servers and datastores at the back end. Among these technologies is ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), which allows easy, powerful and robust control of technologies that access datastores. This book explains the theory and practice of using ADO with ASP by presenting numerous examples, exercises, lists of common errors and quizzes. The emphasis is on the authors' proven teaching techniques and the presentation of the most commonly used features of ADO in ASP. If you read each chapter and do the exercises you will have a portfolio of several dozen data-intensive web pages of increasing complexity a fine return on your investment.

From the Publisher: This book has been selected by the editors of Wrox Press to be part of the Wroxbase website.

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

The publication is well suited to the following groups:
• Readers of Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0 who want to make the next logical step and connect web sites to datastores
• Programmers from the database community who now want to implement their solutions with a Web interface. These folks have plenty of experience with database programming, but want to translate that knowledge into ADO solutions in ASP pages
• Web designers with an education in graphics design or word processing and some sense of programming. These people can benefit from the book by learning how to take their visually appealing sites and give them the business power of database connectivity

About the Author: John Kauffman is a research scientist turned freelance consultant - dividing his time evenly between teaching, writing and programming, primarily in the areas of Visual Basic, Word macros, Access and Access Programming, and ASP.

Kevin Spencer started programming in C in the early '90's before moving on to Microsoft Visual FoxPro and Access. As Internet Database Connectivity technologies began to emerge from Microsoft he recognised the potential and learned them aswell. This programming background led to the creation of "Site Design by TAKempis," a company which specializes in Internet Database application programming with ASP/ADO. Kevin was made an MVP in 1997 and now combines his work commitments with authorial duties including articles about Microsoft FrontPage and ASP/ADO for several online magazines, including Wrox's ASP Today.

Customer Reviews
The REAL power of ASP, August 26, 2000
Reviewer: Shane from Glen Allen, VA United States
I have been designing web pages for years and never really saw the point of using "Programming" in them for my purposes. I kew a bit of VB, so I just skipped the Begining ASP book and dove into this one. I spent about 40 hours with this book and used it cover to cover. I have never done that with a technical book before. The fact that John is a teacher is very evident in this book. There are very few mistakes and the structure is incredibly easy to follow.

I followed all the examples and hand coded most everything rather than just using the prewritten code from the Wrox Site. I learned so much from the book that I couldn't help but to totally change my design methodology. Now when I am writing for an IIS server, I always use ASP. Databases are now integrated into almost all of my work. It's given me a completly new creative outlet.

John has focused on good design practices while he explained the details of connecting to the databases and the methods of interacting with them. I didn't fully digest all of the methods of connecting with ADO, but I just applied his methods to similar work, and it all comes out nicely.

This book focuses strongly on Access, but most of the scripting can be adapted to SQL server easily. All of the Server Side Scripting is done in VBScript and any Client Side is done in Javascript primarily for form validation. That's the standard method for most people, and it's not really confusing when you see it.

You don't need to know ASP before using this book, but it would be helpful to have a good ASP reference available to you. I ran into a few situations where I wanted to do something a bit diferent from the book, and I got stuck becuase I didn't know the syntax for a command I wanted to use. I borrowed a co-worker's "Beginning ASP" a few times, but probably would have been better served with an something which had an index of commands. After reading this book, I immediately set out to do a fully database driven site for my company and they love it. I could easily take a job as a Web "Developer" now.

If you are doing anything complex from an IIS server, whether it's maintaining records, using search capabilities, or just managing a large site, I highly reccomend this book. And ASP in general is very useful if only for the server side includes that can make your site so much easier to maintain.

A well written book filling void in ASP Programming titles, November 4, 1999
Reviewer: Dimiter Gerensky from Vienna, Virginia, USA
I decided to write my review, although I have not completed reading the whole book, because I am convinced more people should know about this book!

It does fill the void left among the numerous ASP programming book with two major advantages
1. It completely answers what the title of the book would have you expect - beginning ASP database programming;
2 - It does it in the most appropriate way - with very professional teaching style which still leaves the student dignity intact.

One little remark - The author overall assumes that certain tasks (particularly the database security types) can be consulted with a DBA, and in my case, in the company I work for, there is no DBA . I believe the book would have benefited from having an appendix on the differences between NT vs. NT/SQL Server mixed type of security, but other than this, the book is just perfect!

Finally, my sincere thank you to John Kauffman and Wrox for a very practical, extremely well written book which comes just in time to answer my professional prayers!

This book is out of date, April 28, 2002
Reviewer: spence07 from Centennial, CO United States
This book is seriously out of date. It does a great job of covering ASP, ADO, database connectons and so on, but there is only one part of one chapter (6) that covers the use of OLE-DB, Microsoft's newest technology that provides the connection and access methods between ASP web pages and databases. The rest of the book, and all the examples, use ODBC which is the older and now out of date method. ODBC was current at the time the book was written, and Mr. Kauffman does a great job of explaining it. However, it is now being replaced by OLE-DB. Also, if you are using Windows 2000 or XP as your development platform, you do not even have the (built-in) option to install ODBC. Instead, OLE-DB comes native with IIS 5.0 which is included with all versions of Windows 2000. Don't buy this book, unless you're still in the dark ages using Win9x or NT.

The real beginners may have trouble configuring the software, April 15, 2002
Reviewer: Ben L. Matthews from Panguitch, Utah United States
I have programming experience in HTML, BASIC, limited COBOL and AS/400. Yet I am writing this review because I do not know how to get through chapter 2.

I did not know this book was written for programmers. The title would indicate it is for beginners. While I don't think I have problems understanding the code, I, like many others, have run into problems installing and configuring the software necessary to learn what is taught in the book - typical of Microsoft products.

This book claims that it's written for the beginner. My question is, what kind of 'beginner' has access to a group of Database Administrator geeks who could help the same 'beginner' get the software installed and configured correctly? I cannot get past chapter 2 because I have no idea how to get the information required to configure a 'DSN for an SQL Datastore.' If you are a 'beginner' reading this review and don't know what a 'DSN for an SQL Datastore' is, good luck with this book. To even get past chapter 2, you need to know the following (this is where your geeky DBA friends that you don't have come in handy):
* network address of your database server * network type of your database server * the security method of your server * a valid login and password for the server * the name of the database within the server

Even worse, this book makes no assumption that the student may not have access to this information and surprisingly, makes no warning in the prerequisite that this information will be required. Furthermore, there is no definition or explanation of these pieces of required information. If you think you can 'tinker and figure it out', you're probably going to see a lot of cryptic Microsoft error messages pointing you nowhere.

If I could get past configuring the data and software, I might be able to learn something from this book. As it stands, I have already been successful installing and configuring PHP and a PHP webserver on the Microsoft OS platform. It takes 5 minutes to configure PHP with no textbook or database administrator. Why isn't ASP that intuitive? If you can get your system configured correctly, this book is probably logical. Good luck.

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