another title aimed at information architects/web designers that doesn't really do the business. it's got some good pictures, but there isn't a great deal of rewarding stuff there.

This book is a must have for any designer's shelf. It offers an intelligent and rational itemization of the ins and outs of website creation. But what is the point of it?

A precise title would have been "Maps of Websites" as it doesn't offer much in terms of step by step instructions on how to do what the authors point out is "good."

So, it comes the closest out of any web-design manual/showcase to a lucid vision of proper web architecture. . .

all of these ideas, however, are thoroughly covered in organizational and planning manuals.

If you're looking for a book that can give you insight on how to structure and organize a web site, or any other screen based application for that matter (wireless, desktop, etc.), keep looking because this is not it.

If you already have a good idea of how you want to organize your website and want to take it to the next level, you need a map that can sequence and structure your ideas in a visual format. Its is one of the best ways to gain insight into the overall user experience, help you optimize your architecture and share it with others (no web skills necessary).

This book is a great tool when it comes to looking at examples that illustrate the best mapping alternative for your particular project. As with all maps, the detailed visual examples are a great way to convey the essence of mapping (yes, it is an art).

I've used the information in this book to build maps that help design efficient sites from scratch and optimize the user experience of highly complex mega-portals.

The only thing missing? A section on software applications that will help you to design maps - I use freehand and illustrator which elevate mapping to art form (great for creating an impact in important pitches). A CD with design clipart would also be a useful resource (symbols, icons, pages, etc.).

This book is one of those that you buy and shelve due to lack of samples and references.. If you already know VB then this might help you. However, I find the ASP books by "Wrox" to be a better investment for my money, in addition they also have a website and a message board that provides you with ongoing support. It's not one of those I got your money and run situation. We're not asking for the history of the Internet.. but some decent samples and explanations would be nice..The author of this book should ask himself one question..why would someone buy a computer related "How to book"..

I found the book useful when I started in writing ASP, however, after I got through the book, I found it lacking as a reference and choose a more detailed reference to keep on the shelf.

This book is the greatest ASP book of all time (in my opinion). Many people have seen my copy and bought their own due to its excellent content. It is a great book for VB developers to start out with ASPs. The only negative point is that interdev 1.0 is used in the examples instead of 6.0. It is better to understand the code though.

I'm normally a big fan of the Wrox books. They generally do an excellent job of selecting authors and editors. This book, however, was a huge disappointment for me.

Others have said, "It's full of samples." While this is true, many of the samples are for very obvious functionality, whereas very fundamental and complex functionality ends up getting minimal treatment (an example is the Fill() methods for the Data Adapter). While there's more written explanation of the Fill() methods, it is sorely inadequate and the samples are very basic. I would expect much more coverage and probably even an appendix at the end to cover it in more depth.

For the most part, I find the book no more useful than the SDK documentation and samples that you get for free. For a book with 10 authors, I'd expect a lot more insight and knowledge to be passed on and sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Even for the "Reference" books Wrox does, they normally do a much better job of passing along great insight from the authors. If you need treeware docs for ADO.NET, then I guess this book will do but personally, I'm sticking with the online documentation.

This book is the single most valuable book I bought from WROX in terms of being able to borrow ADO.net code for my application.

ADO.net is the most undocumented are of .net and this book offers hundreds of code samples. The COM Interopability chapter is very good and introduces he obcure Recordset fill and how to use ADOMD from .net!

The Transaction chapter is way too small and incomplete. Another flaw is the fact that the book is supposed to cover VB.net and C# but they were sloppy and it is not a 50/50 split. Often they forget the VB.net samples. You would think their editors could count and make sure all examples come in pairs.

I think it is a great buy but I hope they get all VB.net examples in 2nd edition and a re-orgnization to be more task oriented.

Wrox lists this book as a "Programmer's Reference". In a reference I look for detailed information and code samples demonstrating usage all of which should be more extensive than what can be found in the help files or online API. This book succeeds very well as a reference providing a great deal of information that you will want to have nearby while you are coding. The book starts off with a description of ADO.NET which I found to be the weakest part of the book. This section doesn't quite put all the pieces of ADO.NET together in a meaningful way. The remainder of the book is excellent. Each of the key ADO.NET classes (DataSet, DataReader, DataAdapter, etc.) and their constructors, properties, methods and events are discussed in detail with code samples in both VB.NET and C#. Each key class or concept (data relationships, transactions, XML mapping, etc.) is given a chapter in the book. The explanations are much more useful that what you will find in the online help files. Besides covering SQL and OLE, the book also covers the ODBC classes which are not documented in the help files included with VS.NET. In a reference the index is important and here the index is good although some entries seem to be off a page or two. If you are looking for an in-depth introduction to using ADO.NET you will want to look at other books. If you need a detailed reference book then this should be your first stop.

This book is a clear and well-written introduction to the latest version of Microsoft's Active Server Pages. It is written how technical books should be written: no messing about, no unnecessary repetition, and a lot of material covered clearly in just over 400 pages.

A clear target audience (experienced ASP and VB6 developers), and clear objectives help - the book's intention is clearly to communicate the essentials, and the practitioner will then get more detail from other sources.

The book clearly presents the VB.NET language, the new ASP architecture, how to develop using server-side and user controls, and supporting technologies such as Web Services and ADO.NET. However, there are some omissions. For example, the book states that you can't raise standard events from User Controls, not only is this possible, but the standard MSDN documentation has a very simple example of how to do so.

If I have a major complaint, it's that the book was not developed around Visual Studio. Instead the examples are mainly pure text, similar to old server pages. This has two drawbacks: it fails to support the new paradigm of web development which Microsoft have finally raised above hacking with a copy of notepad; and it's sometimes difficult to relate the text-only examples to code generated by the Visual Studio design tools, and vice-versa.

Another weakness is shared with many other books on web-based development, especially in the Microsoft arena, with very little focus on how to properly structure code and solution components. I have had to resort to Java-based architectural pattern books, and I think there's a major gap in the market here.

This won't be the only book you'll buy on .NET: I also purchased "VB.NET for Developers" by Franklin, and "the Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library" by Powers & Snell, both in the same series from Sams. However, I can recommend it as a good clear introduction to ASP.NET, which doesn't require you to read thousands of pages.

This book does a great job in providing you with a little information and then an example to try it out, a little more information and then another example to practice it. The theory and practicals are very well balanced. One thing I DON'T like in a book is too many words and theory and not enough examples.

I've read through 3 other books so far and this one has the best gradient on learning a new technology.
Why not 5 stars? With any new technology such as this there are many new technical words introduced. In order to fully grasp a subject you must know what the words mean. Authors should define the new words at the first occurance in a book AND provide a glossary at the back as a reference to these new words. Very, very few books do this. So I just define the words myself and write the definitions in the book.

But, overall I enjoyed this book very much. It's a smaller size than the rest making it very portable. All the examples are in VB.NET too (in case you're wondering).

This book is highly irritating for eight reasons:

1. It constantly tries to SELL you on VRML. Every tenth word is
"exciting".

2. It tells you all sorts of irrelavent stuff, like VMRL 1.0,
early VRML history.

3. It gives almost no examples.

4. It has almost no illustrations of what the VRML will render to.

5. It reads like a W3C reference manual. It constantly presumes you already know everything so there is no need to explain anything.

6. Here is an example of some prose that tells you that you must write "Shape { geometry Sphere" in that order.

"For geometry nodes to appear to the viewer, they must be contained by a Shape node and they can only appear in a geometry
field of a Shape node. Geometry nodes can't be children of group
nodes because they aren't leaf nodes. Geometry nodes, therefore,
must be contained by Shape nodes. The shape node contains one
Geometry node in its geometry field."

ALL THIS WITHOUT A SINGLE EXAMPLE OF WHAT THE HECK HE IS TALKING
ABOUT.

7. You come out the end not able to even do anything more complex than the two simplest W3C examples.

8. 3/4 of the book has nothing to do with how to write VRML.

This book is covering all the features of VRML, we waited long for such a work!

The Language is understandable and clear.

I RECENTLY BOUGHT THIS BOOK IN MY QUEST TO CLIMB ALL 50 STATES HIGHEST PEAKS. ALTHOUGH IT HAS A LIST AND SUMMARY OF ALL THE PEAKS, SOME OF THE INFORMATION IS INCOMPLETE AND/OR OLD. THIS IS PRIMARILY TRUE OF THE ROADS AND ROUTES LEADING UP TO THE CLIMB ITSELF. I HAVE CLIMBED SEVERAL OF THE PEAKS IN THE BOOK AND FOUND THE INFORMATION HELPFUL BUT BY NO MEANS COMPLETE. THE PRIMARY REASONS ARE THAT THE AUTHOR USES OLD ROUTE INFORMATION AND HAS NOT BEEN ON THE PEAKS HIMSELF IN SOME CASES FOR OVER 10 YEARS. THIS BOOK IS A GOOD PLACE TO START YOUR QUEST, BUT YOU MAY WANT TO GET MORE UP TO DATE INFORMATION BEFORE SETTING OUT ON YOUR TREK. (THIS REFERS TO THE 1998 EDITION 4-B)

Yes, it's a bit outdated -- but this is THE classic book on Highpointing. Paul Zumwalt used his skills as a surveyor for USGS to find many of the more obscure state highpoints, and writes in a warm and enjoyable manner about his trips with his wife, Lila.
Paul just turned 90, and still attends Highpointers conventions and climbs to the highpoints.
So, buy this book to enjoy some history. If you want the most recent information, Highpoint Adventures by the Wingers seems to be the most up to date. Start a library of highpointing books!

You will find this book very helpful if you are new to Active Server Pages. The book describes very clearly what ASP is, how it works, what it does, etc. This book will also make the beginner comfortable with how to write basic VBscript or similar in order to code their Active Server Pages. Wonderful coverage is given to all the basic ASP objects, their properties, and methods and how to invoke the power of each. This book has some funny prose to it and is not overly in-depth, but it will make a newcomer comfortable with integrating their current html skills, client-side scripting skills, and ASP into useful applications.

This book is not just about ASP. This book contains chapters on just about everything you can put on a website. (dynamic) HTML, client (in vb) and serversidescripting (vb & jscript). Building components, java-applets, database-access. You name it, and it's there. The downside is that this quite expensive book it not detailed enough. The only chapters that are reasonably complete are the ones about Jscript and VBscript. The others will not get you much further than some "hello world"-like application. The other thing that I don't like about the book that it is very Internet Explorer oriented. The chapters on HTML are completely unusable for netscape-browsers, and this is the only book I know that boasts Vb as a client-side scripting language. Add the very irritatng introductions of the chapters and there you have it. Not a book for pro's, but I can imagine it being usefull for people who wish to know a little about a lot of things and are prepared to buy seperate books for the items they are actually interested in.

Excellent guide for developping dynamic, Interactive Web Site. This book goes into relevent details and guides you through the process of development without assuming that you have 20 years of development experience behind you.

I would recommend it for junior developpers

For developers involved with web-based projects, whether it be an online store for electronic commerce or an Intranet site for accessing and modifying company data, the powerful blend of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technologies can really make life simple. Once you've mastered them, creating new components that encapsulate business logic, or new web interfaces to existing systems, is easy. The trick, for developers, is mastering the technologies.

Professional JSP is one way to get up to speed. Like many of the books published by Wrox Press, Professional JSP covers a specific technology in-depth, as well as the various ancillary topics relating to it such as databases, servlets, and XML. While not every developer will need every web technology covered by the book (and there are many), the book works both as a tutorial to cover the basics and a reference for technologies that you may encounter later.

Professional JSP starts by covering the basics of Java Server Pages, and how they relate to other web technologies. Embedded in HTML pages, JSP provides an easy mechanism for creating interactive web interfaces that draws on server-side components, known as Enterprise JavaBeans. While the presentation logic is written in JSP, the processing occurs within these JavaBean components. The book takes a balanced approach, covering both JSP and its syntax, as well as how to write and interact with JavaBeans to perform useful tasks, like accessing databases through JDBC and using other Java technologies. However, if you've read other Wrox titles, you may find there is some overlap in the topics covered.

One of the nice things about Professional JSP is that, in addition to covering theory, it goes further and examines practical applications of JSP, and issues for programmers like security and debugging. Like other titles in the Professional series, there are case studies of real projects using JSP and related technologies. My favorite would have to be the case study on porting Active Server Pages to JSP -- something that is extremely important for developers with "legacy" web systems. On the whole, Professional JSP is an excellent book for web developers wanting to get up to speed with Java Server Pages, web development, and Enterprise JavaBeans. However, developers with less of a web presentation focus and more of back-end server view may also want to consider the excellent Professional Java Server Programming title, which also covers JSP. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

This book covers the chapters in a very structured way. It starts with a concise description of the JSP Basics with a detailed explanation of the concepts. It explains all the concepts in a very clear and simple words supported by an equally clear Comments and examples. Any body with a little of Java experience can become very familiar with the JSP syntax and concepts by reading first few chapters. It covers all the necessary JSP syntax for building a small web application to a very large distributed Application. It also explains about the way the JSP pages are processed by different web servers. For example it explains about the various methods available to maintain a persistence session and their merits and demerits. This is the first book in JSP series that explains not only the concepts of JSP and how effectively one can use them with the help of this book. It also covers various other topics like EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT and WML in very detailed way. Overall I feel this is the greatest JSP book ever published so far. I could build a simple and robust JSP Web application by reading the first few chapters in a short period of time.

This books lives up to its title in that it provides both real-world JSP techniques (through 7 very informative case studies chapters), as well as JSP background information that serves as a quick start guide. I rank it as one of the top 2 JSP books currently available (the other one is Web Development With JavaServer Pages by Messrs. Fields and Kolb).

After the JSP fundamentals are out of the way (which I am sure any JSP newcomer will appreciate and can benefit from), the book picks up pace with discussion on JDBC connection pooling, and the best practice for data access from JSP. Then comes the chapter on custom tags. My favorite chapters are the ones on debugging JSP's and implementing the MVC design pattern in JSP/servlets.

The case studies are very comprehensive and closely correlated to the earlier chapters. In one case study the design methodology is clearly explained with UML diagrams, which are very helpful to someone who is currently architecting an enterprise Java Web application. Other case studies cover such a wide area of topics such as JSP in combination with LDAP, EJB, XSL, and WAP.

For ASP developers, this books has two enormously useful chapters to get them started on JSP right away. One is a case study showing how to port an ASP app to JSP, and the other compares and contrasts the object model and syntax between ASP and JSP.

Having said all the above, this book does suffer from certain weaknesses. One is typical of any multi-author book, i.e., repeat of the same topic in different chapters. This is the case with JDBC, which shows up in both chapters 4 and 7. Another problem is the lack of the use of a standard servlet/JSP container, which will help new users to run all samples under the same software setting (although there is an appendix on setting up Tomcat server). Finally, a few chapters seem to be out of place in term of the logic flow of concept, such as the ones on dynamic GUI's and JNDI.

Finally, this book is still thin on heavy-duty J2EE topics, such as EJB, distributed transactions, message service, and interoperability with CORBA. This is why I consider it as an intermediate level book, not an advanced one. Hopefully we will see another Wrox book in the near future that addresses some of these issues.

am I supposed to do with a fony Tarot application. I toatlly agree with the previous reviews. TO much hassel. I am getting into some flash application development, for which I got the taste after working my way through Friends of Ed's Dynamic Content Studion, which, by the way, is an EXCELLENT book....

but this....c'mon

As Flash might finally emerge from experimental eye-catching gimmick to become the next generation front end for high commercial, dynamic web applications, this book really sets the wrong tone (explaining more about Tarot than XML does not match the book's title, right?).

Although writing the first four chapters must have been fun for the authors - for us, the readers, its just painful. Long and rather vague, XML is described from many angles without getting on a level where you really would know where to start in a practical sense. So when you really have to know about XML, or just need some reference, this book is most probably not for you.

Chapter 5, trying to compensate for the lengthy introduction, finally presents the XML object in warp speed. (If you are new to the subject, statements like "it would be so much easier if objects could be made directly from objects instead of having to remember its class" are more confusing than helpful, reflect bad style and do not really sell the idea behind object oriented programming).

Chapters 6 to 10 are not that bad when showing how XML shuffles the tarot cards. Still it might be too cloudy for beginners as the authors just lack focus.

The Rest of the book (XML Sockets, Perl Scripting, mySQL, PHP) gives you some ideas for the next books to buy, but definitively offer nothing you can start to do real business with.

In a nutshell: When having read this book you will know what XML is on a high level and how you deal with it once it sits within your flash movie. But this is not what XML was primarily made for.
When having read this book you still will not have much of a clue from where you will get interesting, business relevant XML data and how to make your flash application talk to the professional world of high end, high paid real world applications. Neither is there much help about dealing with end to end responsibilities. (test, debug, tune end to end transactions from Flash front-end, via web- and application servers down to databases and vice versa).

For my taste this book still remains with the classic, design oriented flash programmer rather than to finally extend Flash's scope into the realm of serious application development. The book's focus is ways too much on how XML is used internally within flash, rather than to make XML do what it was designed for: standardized communication across new and existing systems and new (web) services. Otherwise you might really ask yourself, what all the fuzz about XML really is.

As I have already said: do not polish your Porsch in your garage, take it out , learn to drive and experience the real world!

last week I bought the book , and till now it looks SO gerat

This book does not have any real-world examples. The specifications mentioned in this book are also dated. The content in this book is a little dated. For a current book on Web Services check out Java Web Services Architecture published by Morgan Kaufman.

This book has a random collection of topics. I cannot believe a publisher actually published it. It discusses DTDs and XSLTs in great detail while completely ignoring XML Schemas and SOAP basics. I absolutely decided to return the book when I found a section discussing viruses - specifically the ILOVEYOU virus. If Amazon provided a way to give this a negative rating, I would gladly do so.

I bought this book on high hopes as it is from Deitel and Deitel. But I am not impressed...and I am wondering hou could they name it as for "experience programmers". I would say, this book is for Novice programmers.

The first 6 chapters are very very XML basics not related to Web services. And the rest of chapters shows up with a simple example with no complexity and surprisingly the code did'nt work with latest JWSDP download from sun site. It looks like the code needs an update.

Chapter 12 to 14 does not address any practical reality and the case studies Chapter 14-16 are not well illustrated and the code did'nt work for me.