2022-01-23 - Programming Active Server Pages

Programming Active Server Pages was written by Scott Hillier and Daniel Mezick and published by Microsoft Press in 1997. This book discusses Active Server Pages (ASP), one of Microsoft’s early attempts at building a server-side website development platform. The idea is that you create .asp files with sections of VBScript or JavaScript code in them which is ran by the server and the resulting HTML page is then sent to the client. This is similar to ASP.net, JSP and PHP in both functionality and look. The main benefit of ASP like the other similar technologies is that you can have dynamic pages, pages where the content changes based on some condition, without needing to run code on the client machine. This has security advantages as the client has less of a chance to interfere with the operation and also means you aren’t reliant on the client supporting the technology you want to use. This book does some things I like and some things I don’t like so overall my opinion is very middling.

Starting with things I like. I like examples and this book has a lot of them. The practical examples are identified by numbered steps which helps to separate them from informational examples. They also go into quite a bit of detail which makes them easy to follow. The final few chapters of the book are entirely devoted to examples which is nice as it gives you an in-depth look at the things being talked about in the book.

As for things I don’t like, I don’t like books that aren’t clear what they are about. For a book about ASP this book spends a lot of time talking about non-ASP things like dynamic HTML and client side scripting. It’s a bit telling when you can make it to chapter 5 before the main topic of the book starts to get discussed. I don’t mind books that gives additional information but I feel like the the main topic should be the focus.

I also think the book should have focused more on the syntax of VBScript and JavaScript up-front. There’s an appendix dedicated to that topic but I think it would have been better if it was a part of the introduction. That might just be my preference for beginner books where the topic is explained from the ground-up and there isn’t a lot of assumed knowledge.

One final criticism is the reliance on pre-release technology. There’s a decent amount of ActiveX in the book, which is fine, but the book seems to have been written before all the ActiveX controls were finalized. This means that in some cases the GUID used to reference the control or the parameters used by the control in examples don’t actually work. It’s not clear to the reader if they did something wrong or if the book is wrong. I get the desire to have the book out in time for the launch of the functionality but It’s probably best to wait to write about things until you know they won’t change, otherwise you are just setting your readers up for issues.

Overall I enjoyed the book and found the writing and examples interesting. I think the book could have been a lot better if it focused more exclusively on ASP, has more introductory content about the languages used and didn’t reference things that were incorrect by the time the book was published but it’s by no means terrible.