Active Server Pages for Dummies

Active Server Pages (ASP) is the best way to create dynamic Web sites--that is, Web sites based on the contents of a database--under Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and other Microsoft Web platforms. Active Server Pages for Dummies proves that despite the initially intimidating appearance of some ASP code, the system isn't hard to learn and can be a lot of fun.

The book delivers a carefully structured introduction to ASP technology. The examples aren't all academic either--you'll find code (printed and on the companion CD-ROM) for a date-stamper, a banner-ad rotator, a guestbook, and even a near-real-time chat room and a system for managing classified ads.

Though this book includes sections on VBScript and JScript, you'll probably want to combine it with a language text if you lack familiarity with at least one of those languages. Still, the language material that's here serves as a good introduction to the basics and enables you to make sense of the scriptable ASP objects that make the technology so powerful.

Though this isn't an object reference, the author explains the capabilities of each major server component and provides example code that uses many of them. That's the strongest aspect of this book, in fact--the excellent example code you can learn from and adapt to your purposes. --David Wall

Topics covered: Basics of ASP, VBScript, JScript, the ASP object model, server components, database connectivity, Visual InterDev, and popular ASP applications.