Want to learn to build your own amazon.com? It's in this book. You'll have to be proficient with ansi-SQL and/or ADO 2.0 in order to really take advantage of the information presented here. But overall it's a well presented book on ASP. If you plan to buy this and want to build true interactive sites with full database integration, pick up ADO 2.0 Programmer's Reference and Instant SQL Programming also from WROX Press, then you'll have a strong book base to build powerful web sites such as amazon.com. The only drawback is its concentration on VBScript rather than ECMAscript (aka JavaScript). Try and stay away from the VBScript presented in this book and use ECMAScript for the examples instead. The reason is because Microsoft and Netscape are finally agreeing on ECMAScript standards that will be much easier to translate into Client-side Cross-browser code if you use it for Server-side code now. As ECMAscript matures it will present a much more flexible environment to work in than VBScript will (much the same way that C compared to Visual Basic does now). I don't have a book recommendation for ECMAscript, I haven't found a good reference yet, the info on the web has been my resource. But if you're desparate for a reference, WROX Press also has a handbook called Instant JavaScript that isn't too bad, but has lots of room more improvement. Happy Building! Ciao -C

First a few things about myself at the time I bought this book:

I am an amature web developer - hobby for the most part. I am not a MCSE. I am not a professional programmer.

The book moves pretty quickly after the first few chapters on the history of the web and networks. Then it jumps right into the meat and potatoes of the ASP object model for the next few chapters. You really have to read these chapters about 4 times, and if you take a week or 2 off, don't expect to retain anything. I see more stuff in there every time I read it. It is just up to you to really disect it all. It is not an easy read, but I will not let that keep my score down on it.

The examples are good at showing the discussed ideas on the page, but entire applications can be spread out over 10 pages, making it hard to just look at the whole picture. Definitely keep your highlighter handy, or you'll miss something you swore was right in front of you the last time you opened the book.

The second half of the book honestly blew me away. I am not sure if I will ever use it. It covered topics like Transactions and security and scalability, which if you are not doing this work full time is really not ever going to concern you.

Although I have not read it, I think the Beginning ASP 2.0 book would probably have been the better bet, but I guess it is just like me to want to have the "best" and bought the next one up. One book that I can recommend as a compliment is the Beginning ASP Databases. Typically it is my experience that you're going to use ASP do connect to a database and Professional ASP, although gives a descent intro to it, really should have the DB book right next to it on your shelf.

Oh yeah, be sure to have some VB programming experience, or else the learning curve gets a little longer.

One more thing, this is all good for Win98 PWS and NT4.0 IIS 4.0. If you're going to be on Win2000, you need a book on ASP 3.0.

Let me put my review in perspective. I have been programming in one language or another for almost twenty years. I am an Internet Engineer for a Fortune 500 company. I perform contract work consisting of database design and implementation. In other words, I'm very familiar with many of the topics as they're presented in this book. Coming from this background, I found this book to be an invaluable resource.

I would NOT recommend this book to a beginner. I can't stress this point enough.

For an experienced programmer (and not just an experienced web surfer or HTML author!), the Wrox "Professional" series are a tremendous resource. Too many Internet-programming books start out with the history of CERN, HTML, ad nauseum. The "advanced" books are only useful as references, but you could never read them cover-to-cover. For me, the Wrox "Professional" books fall somewhere in between--exactly what I'm looking for.

"Professional Active Server Pages 2.0" did a great job of bringing web applications all together: from server side scripting, to client side scripting, to configuring IIS 4.0, to programming and installing Visual Basic components, to implementing transactions with Transaction Server. I found the segments regarding Internet security to be especially interesting. Although several of the examples assume a Windows NT Server 4.0 setup with IIS 4.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 6.5, I was able to implement many of them using Peer Web Services on Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Personal Web Server on Windows 98, and Microsoft Access 97.

The book does have some drawbacks: there are some pages that have incorrect code examples. Chapter six, which covers the Server Object model references many components which simply do not function as advertised. I had to purchase the "Internet Information Server Resource Kit" and install some of the components from the accompanying CD-ROM before I could use them. However Wrox does provide an errata bulletin board on their website, and there are a few discussion groups there as well that can help you through these types of problems. I even e-mailed Wrox for some of my questions, and was very grateful to receive answers straight from the authors.

If you are already comfortable with object-oriented programming, and have a reasonable understanding of the Internet, then you should find this book to be a great resource. I can't recommend it highly enough. However, the novice web programmer who is simply looking to spice up their pages with a little server side scripting would be well advised to look elsewhere.