Foundation ASP for Dreamweaver 8 (ISBN 1590595688)

Excellent Book:
Foundation ASP for Dreamweaver 8 is an excellent book. I'm a novice Dreamweaver user and definitely new to ASP. This book simply tells you how to set up an interactive site with brief tutorials in Dreamweaver, ASP, and MS SQL Server. In a matter of days I was up and running and created a fantastic website. If you are a beginner, newbie or even an intermediate web developer then I would highly recommend this book!

ASP for Dreamweaver 8:
On the positive side, there are some very nice snippets of code that can be used and some nice insight into a couple of coding issues common to the dynamic environment. But - there are some errors in the coding that beginners may not figure out that stop the examples from running correctly. This book could really benefit from a review and revision. It's examples often are not explained fully and I found myself having to go back and re-read sections to try and figure out what was supposed to be done. Having programmed in several other dynamic languages, I was just looking for something to quickly get me up to speed, this is not the book to do that.

Great book!:
Just got this book today.. Started reading it on the train to work, and it's taught me a lot already! I've got some knowledge of ASP and creating dynamic websites that use Access for data retrieval. However, I wanted to move on to something more powerful such as SQL Server 2000, and write my code in a way that would embrace such a change. This book offers a few real-world from-the-ground-up tutorials for various types of websites that are popular these days. I recommend this book to anyone who's learning how to write dynamic websites using Microsoft technologies.

Disjointed and Unfocused:
My rating is 2 and 1/2 stars, not 3. Before I read this book, I went through another book that had been on my bookshelf for a couple of years: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Dynamic Applications by Jeffrey Bardzell. I mentioned this book because I not only want to highly recommend it, but I also want to make some comparisons between Bardzell's book and ASP for DW 8. It's always a bad sign when you spend a lot time confused and trying to figure out what the book is trying to teach you instead of spending that time on learning. This book could have used a good editor to get rid of the word clutter and to better organize its ideas. I often had to reread parts of the book to understand what the authors were trying communicate. The tutorials were random and many were unclear as to how they would be applied in the real world of web development. This book could have been much better had the authors guided the readers through the actual development of a web site using the tutorials to illustrate how asp is used in the real world. This is what Macromedia DW Dynamic Apps does; Bardzell's readers build a web site using asp and DW. Never once did I have to stop and figure out what he was communicating. His instruction was crystal clear and before you know it, you have developed a dynamic web site. I am creating a web site right now utilizing the lessons that I learned from DW Dynamic Apps. I highly recommend that book. Incidentally, you don't have to worry about that book being out of date; even though I am using DW8, I found that all of the screen shots are the same. The publisher could put a new cover on it with the title of DW 8 Dynamic Apps and you would not know the difference. I learned a few good things from ASP for DW 8, but it's a frustrating book. I have not read that last two chapters yet, so I hope I will pick up some good information from those chapters. I might add that web designers who are trying to make the leap to dynamic apps should have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of databases. I have been working with Access for a few years (I actually teach it) and I think you will be lost without knowing about databases. I also read SQL in 10 minutes by Ben Forte to give me a better understanding of SQL.