Looking for book recomendations

[irbk]

I'm brand new to ASP and would like to learn it. As I don't have the $,$$$ to take a course on it, I would like to pick up a book on it. I don't learn well from books but in the past, I've learned lots from the "Visual Quickpro Guide" series. However, the "ASP.NET Development with Dreamweaver MX: Visual QuickPro Guide" (the only Visual QuickPro on asp I could find) is from 2002. I don't know if I want to pick up a book where the information in it is at least 4 years old. So, I'm asking for suggestions. Given (as I said above) that I don't learn very well from books, unless the book is very well written. What book would you suggest? Would you suggest the Visual Quickpro even though it's publish date is 2002? What other book would you suggest?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tarwn]

It depends on whethere you want to learn "CLassic" ASP, otherwise known as ASP 3.0, or ASP .Net.

Classic ASP has not changed appreciably in the past few years. ASP.Net, on the other hand, has. If your interested in learning ASP .Net you should check that forum directly. If your interested in learning classic ASP I would suggest starting here:

http://www.w3schools.asp/

in their ASP section. That should at least be enough to give you a taste for the language. Once you have gotten that far, then I would suggest a book, as you should be able to hten have a better idea what level the book is operating on, even if you don't necesarally understand all that is ASP yet.

Additionally you can use the search button above to search this forum, as their have been several posts in the past about ASP books.

 

[Floodster]

I was like yourself about 6 months ago & a friend borrowed me Active Server Pages for Dummies. I found it easy to read with workable examples & it came with a CD with all the demos on.

I can't say it's learnt me everything I know but it was a good starting point.

I agree with Tarwn that w3schools is a good place on the net for beginners.

Good Luck.

 

[irbk]

I'm only looking to learn ASP (I'm a PHP boy myself) in order to understand a website that I've just recently taken over. All the extentions for the files on the website are .ASP files so I'm going to assume that the site was written in, as you put it, "classic" ASP. That's what I'm intrested in learning. I'm very familar with w3schools and have learned all I can from there tutorials.
As I've not gotten any other suggestions, I guess I'll look at the Active Server Pages for Dummies (yuck) book. I've not found a dummies book yet that I've really liked. I hope this one will be different.

Thanks.

 

[xwb]

I used the "for dummies" book - it wasn't too bad. Gets you started with IIS, does VBScript and JavaScript and then goes on to file I/O and database stuff. A lot of the stuff is easily translatable if you already know PHP.

The asp pages can use VBScript or JavaScript but the client must be

What I found annoying was that the author preferred switching between HTML and server scripting instead of doing everything in the server script. The code looks really messy but I suppose it is each to his own.

A decent editor really helps. I tend to use a mixture: vi, syn, mse7 and even notepad. Frontpage is pretty useless when it comes to scripting. Depends on what the machine has. Almost all machines that have Office will have mse7 but you will have to hunt for it.