Active Server Pages for Dummies

Active servers aren't busy food service professionals at your local diner -- they're part of a growing new technology for creating dynamic Web sites that are guaranteed to keep visitors coming back again and again. By using simple scripting languages, such as VBScript and JavaScript, you'll soon be writing intelligent and interactive Web pages that are adaptable to popular Web browsers, to specific user preferences, or even to the time of day! With Active Server Pages For Dummies in hand, you'll become a pro at developing exciting, dynamic Web pages for the Internet or for your own company intranet. Using Microsoft's ActiveX Data Objects to access and manipulate database information simplifies the nightmare of online database management by enabling you to use down-to-earth commands and controls. And you can use Active Server objects to work with forms, access cookies, dynamically change the content of your HTML pages, share information among people visiting your site, and much, much more! Active Server Pages For Dummies has a surefire way to perk up your Web sites, too: a bonus CD-ROM packed with all the source code from the book, Microsoft's latest Internet Explorer 4.01, HomeSite 3 (an HTML editor that works great for creating ASP pages), and Chili!ASP, an add-on that allows non-Microsoft Web servers to use Active Server Pages technology.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is the best way to create dynamic Web sites--that is, Web sites based on the contents of a database--under Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and other Microsoft Web platforms. Active Server Pages for Dummies proves that despite the initially intimidating appearance of some ASP code, the system isn't hard to learn and can be a lot of fun.

The book delivers a carefully structured introduction to ASP technology. The examples aren't all academic either--you'll find code (printed and on the companion CD-ROM) for a date-stamper, a banner-ad rotator, a guestbook, and even a near-real-time chat room and a system for managing classified ads.

Though this book includes sections on VBScript and JScript, you'll probably want to combine it with a language text if you lack familiarity with at least one of those languages. Still, the language material that's here serves as a good introduction to the basics and enables you to make sense of the scriptable ASP objects that make the technology so powerful.

Though this isn't an object reference, the author explains the capabilities of each major server component and provides example code that uses many of them. That's the strongest aspect of this book, in fact--the excellent example code you can learn from and adapt to your purposes. --David Wall

Topics covered: Basics of ASP, VBScript, JScript, the ASP object model, server components, database connectivity, Visual InterDev, and popular ASP applications.