ASP in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference

ASP is one of many tools that tries to solve a problem. That problem is: The internet is boring when static.

There are other solutions out there, such as CGI or PHP, but Microsoft had to enter its candidate into the ring, and as such, ASP was born. ASP stands for "Active Server Pages." With ASP, you can create pages that have dynamic, server-side content, regardless of the browser capabilities of the client. And it's as easy as putting blocks of code into your regular HTML files.

This book is a comprehensive guide to ASP. It will tell you pretty much anything you need to know to use it. Granted, nowadays, we have something called ASP.NET, which is much, much better, if you're working on ancient webservers, you'll probably have to wrangle ASP without a .NET. For those such situations, this book is great.

I hate Visual Basic, a language that should have been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. This book presents most code snippets in Visual Basic, as since it's another product of Microsoft, the two go hand-in-hand. Fortunately, the book says you can use other languages (Which you can also do in .NET), but does very little to tell you all about that.

This book, being a product of O'Reilly, is the cream of the crop when it comes to technical manuals, but as such, I would only recommend you get it if you're dealing with plain old (and I mean old) ASP. O'Reilly, being the pinnacle of technical publishers, has a collection of books for the latest and greatest flavor, too. ( )

This book has ever been by my side since about 1998. It is an excellent reference to the standard objects provided in ASP, as well as ADO, file system, and others. If you do ASP on a daily basis, this is a great reference to have around, and I always make sure it's at my desk. ( )