Debugging ASP: Troubleshooting for Programmers Book

ASP is the most widely used dynamic Web page server technology, largely because it is simple to implement. The trade-off is often not knowing what is going on under the hood. So, after showing you how to set up IIS, Debugging ASP provides a chapter on the Fundamental Mistakes ASP users tend to make. There are half a dozen or so which are explained and discussed in depth. File system issues are also dealt with at length, probably because Windows users tend to be unfamiliar with the concept of permissions--and by the way, some readers might resent the implications in the phrase "Windows command console (sometimes called DOS by old-time programmers)..." When did new-time start?What Ferguson does is highlight some kind of error condition or failure and then tell you which box you forgot to tick or which dialog you forgot to fill in. Occasionally he tells you you're doing something stupid--such as having two or more scripts calling each other in a loop, or failing to register a component thus making its GUID unavailable. He even explains constants, which perhaps says more than anything else about the level of expertise he expects ASP programmers to have.Debugging ASP is really more about explaining technology than programming. COM and DCOM is explained along with transaction processing and other technologies an ASP programmer might encounter, but real programming with VB is barely touched on.Overall, the earlier part of the book is valuable to ASP programmers but the latter sections produce more questions than answers. --Steve PatientRead More