our linear algebra class prof. told us that this is the most readable math book, that's why the math dept. switched to this book this year. =)

I generally love Wrox books. They are generally the top of the list for working programmers. I bought this book, hoping to reduce the heft of my Reference Library of ASP 2.0. And, it failed.

I am not saying that this is a bad book. For the price, it is hard to beat. But, the examples used are not nearly as real world as Professional Active Server Pages, and a lot is left out in the creation of data objects. Perhpas the publisher intends you to pick up the ADO reference also.

If you program ASP as a regular part of your job, the charts at the back are nice and well worth the $19.99 suggested retail. But, do not throw away your books on database access or you will pull your hair out.

In summary, this is a good book that should have been a great book.

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.