[.uk] Alex Homer's Professional ASP 3.0 Web Techniques (ISBN 1861003218)

Amazon.com Review:
One of the attractions Web development offers to programmers is the endless possibility to learn new tricks, exploit the latest technology, and continually build more efficient sites. In Alex Homer's Professional ASP Web Techniques, programmer extraordinaire Alex Homer shares some of his favorite Active Server Pages (ASP) tips and illustrates how to make the most of the technology cards you're dealt. This book focuses on ASP 3 programming on the Windows 2000 platform, and Homer makes it clear in the introduction that the reader should already be familiar with ASP and general Web development. He wastes no time getting down to business, showing how to dish up dynamic sites, and opening your mind to the concept of a single-page site that relies on database records to produce an unlimited number of pages of content. The book doesn't follow a definite "bottom up" track. Instead, it flows more like a conversation with the author--complete with a "Plug and Play" chapter comprising juicy tidbits that don't fit neatly in the other chapters. Homer's examples of implementing cross-browser compatible framesets and sophisticated line and pie graphs of user and site statistics are especially intriguing and useful. All of the techniques are presented with a balanced combination of screen shots, code snippets, and commentary. The author wraps up this fun book with a "Blue Sky" chapter, in which he shares some of his knowledge of upcoming technologies such as ASP+, XHTML, BizTalk, COM+, and more. This is a fitting conclusion to a very engaging guide to ASP. --Stephen W. Plain Topics covered: Dynamic page design, browser compatibility, access control, remote administration, error handling, broken link management, user tracking and statistics charting, e- mail integration, XML, certificates, and ASP components.

ASP Tricks OK:
I have spent a good amount of time working with ASP and other forms of VBscripting. This book has taught a thing or two about ASP, but I believe that it would have been much more useful for me as I was learning to use the technology. I believe this book has little to reveal to experts but it's something very useful to have if you're a casual programmer or teacher. Homer deals with a great number of common ASP problems, errors and how to make scrips more efficient and reliable.

The topping of an ASP cake.:
Some people, so it seems, expected Alex Homer to break ground rules with his knowledge of ASP. He is a wonderful writer and a terrific programmer, but he's also just another joe. This book will not teach you to program better, it'll teach to think better about designing certain scenario where ASP is needed. It'll show you new and innovative ways to solve problems. It doesn't mean you need to be an expert to understand this book, anyone can understand it. The experienced ones will know what to do to make those ideas work, the newbies will know where to look for information to make these things work. This book is for everybody. It's very useful when you come to a point when you have the technical knowledge, but don't know what to do with it.

A Must if you have worked in ASP for 2-3 months:
This is not the book to start with but an excellent resource I would always like to keep with me once I am aware of ASP and want to go further into the details which not everyone knows.