Buy this book
Book Review: A Preview of Active Server Pages+
Authors: Richard Anderson, Alex Homer, Rob Howard,
Dave Sussman
Wrox Press (361pp)
Reviewed by:
Peter Bromberg
With the NGWS Framework preview
freely available from Microsoft to anyone who cares to download it, developers
now have the outstanding opportunity to begin working with a new technology
that, although still in "pre-beta" status, is considered "feature complete".
I was fortunate enough to be one of the 6,000 people who attended the Professional
Developers Conference in Orlando in July 2000. There is no substitute for
this in order to get a developer to "see the light" on a new technology.
In sum, I was amazed at the power and substance of the NGWS framework that
the gurus at Microsoft have been working on for the last two or three years.
Visual Basic 7.0 with inheritance, strong typing and free threading (among
many other enhancements) really got me excited. I've been playing with the
Visual Studio .NET IDE, creating Webservices and using ASP+ and ADO+. I can't
easily describe the development power that these new technologies bring to
the table, other than to say that this is a major advancement in web development
technology.
The Common
Language Runtime opens up a whole new world for developers who can now use
the IDE to program in VB, C#, Cobol, Eiffel, JavaScript and other languages
that are being rolled out by excited third party vendors. While the idea
of writing a web application in Cobol probably doesn't excite you, the idea
of being able to inherit a class written in Visual Basic into your C# application
should make some lightbulbs go off in the brain.
This book,
written by four "guru - level" authors who were given special advance access
to the Microsoft NGWS Frameworks team headed by Mark Anders, is a masterpiece
of concise, "how to" authoring. Loaded with examples and extensive in its
treatment of the various ASP+ / NGWS classes and features, this book is a
"must have" for any developer who understands the power of this new development
platform and the advances it can bring in terms of building the next generation
of web applications and services, and enjoying the productivity gains to be
realized from embracing this cutting - edge technology. Together with XML
and XSLT, the NGWS Framwork provides the basis the advanced developer needs
to tackle the programming challenges of the 21st century.
I give this book my highest "five stars" rating. If
you only buy one development book this year, make it A Preview of Active Server
Pages+.