I was very disappointed with this book. All of the other ASP books by WROX are excellent, so I felt safe in buying this work, assuming it would be excellent as well. Unfortunately, I was wrong. The main problem is the layout. Most programmer references are laid out in a dictionary style format. ASP 2.0 Programmer's Reference in laid out in chapters instead, making it difficult to find code snippets. To do so, one must search through the Index. For example: to find about Request.Form, you look in the Index and find: Request.Form collection. See Form Collection. Then you flip to Form Collections, 38-45 and then you have to search pages 38-45 to find anything...very irritating. Most of the book is like that. That is not to say that the book is completely without merit. The chapter on ASP 3.0 and what it will bring is mildly entertaining and informative. If you don't already have Beginning ASP 2.0, Professional ASP 2.0 and Professional ASP Techniques for Webmasters, any of those fine books would be a better investment.

After reading the other reviews on this book. I have to agree with some of what they are saying. This book is not up to the standards of the other ASP books by Wrox but I think it hits the mark on a lot of things. First and formost it is a reference book and it does an ok job at that. I found many of the examples useful but not nearly as thorough as Professional Active Server Pages 2.0 I wish it would have gone a little further in its discussion of handling oracle back end work. I think the whole world thinks that SQL Server 6.5 is what is used and that is just not the case. Oracle is a much more prevelant database for use with ASP than SQL Server 6.5

This book did me good. As an independent consultant, I have to constantly retrain at my own expense. In a few nights, I read 200 pages and was building small ASP database applications. It is worth a lot more than I paid for it. ASP 2.0 is very organized. It covers the basics from setting up the ASP environment to how to organize a good ASP application. While advertised as a programmer's reference, it has a lot more than just lists of objects and methods. It was enough to bridge me from C++ gunslinger to ASP pea-shooter. I found it thorough to an appropriate level, fast to read, and with a focus on performance. It does expect you to pick up VBScript yourself, but there are enough code snippets that I managed without having ever used VB more than a day. They can't cover every detail in a book of this brevity and I'm glad they didn't. If they did, I'd still be reading and not writing code.