Developers of Active Server Pages often reinvent the wheel. Their background in web design, with its separate HTML page for each viewable web page on a site, leads many ASP developers to create a distinct ASP page each time they think they need one. Often times, these pages are functionally similar. With intelligent planning, an ASP developer stands to save a great deal of time by creating reusable ASP pages. Designing Active Server Pages is tailor-made for these developers. There is currently a plethora of Active Server Pages books. However, the vast majority of these books are either technical references or how-to books for beginners. Designing Active Server Pages is written for the intermediate to advanced user. Furthermore, nearly every other book on ASP focuses on using VBScript, even though ASP supports an array of scripting languages, including JScript and PerlScript. Designing Active Server Pages shows how to start using these other languages. The latest version of the scripting engines (Version 5.1 for VBScript) adds new features not available before the 5.0 release. These features include class support for VBScript, and Regular Expression searching through the use of a COM object. Designing Active Server Pages explains why using classes in VBScript is beneficial, and demonstrates the power of regular expression searching. This book shows how to simplify the process by only requiring one ASP page to handle ALL of the Forms throughout a web site, thus reducing the amount of code one has to write. Topics include:

• Using various Microsoft and third-party components to enhance ASP pages

• Creating components using VB and/or VC++

• Sample code for performing routine ASP tasks

• Techniques to allow for reusable database scripts on the database system and on ASP pages

• How to obtain and register third-party components, thus saving massive amounts of time by reusing someone else's code

Designing Active Server Pages is for developers who have already mastered the basics of ASP application development and are ready to take the next logical step. It is sure to become an indispensable part of every web developer's library.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 33 Ratings

Excellent work, but please organize the sample code - 2002-07-10
Reviewer Rating:
This VERY young author has done something seasoned technical writers twice his age have not often done: written an extremely useful, information and well thought out book, with plenty of implementable examples, and all in a book of less than 350 pages. It so often seems that these kinds of books suffer from "mission creep", and hence bloat into the 1500-page monsters we so often see. Because he was able to keep the scope of his task clearly in mind, he also provides a thorough "Further Reading" section at the end of each chapter, where he provides links to a number of on-line articles. (Yes, you could find these yourself, but how great that a professional in the field has taken the time to find them seek them out for you -- and I was glad all that extra stuff wasn't in the book itself.)

The one complaint I have is that the source code for this book, which you can download from the O'Reilly site, is a chaotic, inextricable mess of files with arbitrary names that are impossible to link to any specific examples in the book (I wouldn't mind that the file names are arbitrary, if he told you in the book which file a given example was associated with -- but no luck there). Really inexcusable.

Excellent Book - 2005-05-17
Reviewer Rating:
This book is very helpful if you want to learn advanced ASP programming techniques. After I bought a basic ASP programming book with discount through couponsky.com, I also bought this book. I found this book teach reader a lot of ASP programming tricks. It is very useful if you want to learn some advanced ASP techniques. I recommend this book to people who already has some basic ASP knowledge.

Excellent Book - 2002-12-10
Reviewer Rating:
Scott Mitchell is an excellent author. I love his articeles on 4GuysFromRolla.com. I am freelance internet consultant and have used most of the examples in this book in one form or another.

Highly recommended for up and coming "Advanced" ASP developers.

Disappointing - 2004-01-04
Reviewer Rating:
I am sorry. In my opinion this book is a waste of paper. I have
tried to find some answers to simple questions
about ASP in this book. Things concerning little
things one might forget and you want to look up.
After a few times using the book in this way it's clear this book tells us little useful things. Even free (digital/psd) manuals on ASP are a lot more useful. After
buying this book from amazon it went quite quickly to a dump shop, sorry...

Program Design for ASP - 2002-02-24
Reviewer Rating:
I have around 20 titles in my personal library which focus directly or indirectly on ASP. This is simply the best. It isn't an introduction to the language -- there are several good ones for that -- it is more about using sound program design methodology to accomplish some of the more complex tasks facing ASP programmers, such as content management systems, reusable forms, and eCommerce.

If you have any programming experience in other languages and are moving to ASP, get this book. If you are just learning what an Active Server Page is, then it is not for you, but if you plan to do anything more than fairly simple pages in ASP, get it, even if you don't think you're ready for advanced stuff.

Scott gives good examples, clear explanations, and lays out methodology that will help you no matter what your level of experience. It's one of the best bargains out there in technical books.

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