Sebastopol, CA--Interest in developing custom ASP components is growing as programmers move to Windows 2000, making a second edition of Developing ASP Components (O'Reilly US $49.95) a logical and necessary step. "Much of component architecture has changed drastically between Windows NT and Windows 2000," says author Shelley Powers, whose book has been completely revised to cover the major issues of interest to component developers running Windows 2000 and working with IIS 5.0 and ASP 3.0.
According to Powers, "We're seeing that interest in developing components is enhanced, because of the compatibility between components written for COM+ and Windows 2000 and the components written specifically for Microsoft's new ASP.NET architecture."
Developing ASP Components focuses on components developed within the Windows 2000/COM+ framework. Powers explains that ".NET is both a successor and companion development infrastructure to COM+, with the understanding that COM+ components are forward compatible within the .NET infrastructure (in project or binary form)."
Powers also adds, "While folks are waiting for .NET to stabilize--they can be creating their components within ASP/COM+ and rest assured that the components should port to the new infrastructure when it releases."
As in the first edition of her book, Powers writes for the developer who understands the need for and is aware of the complexities of developing custom ASP components, however has not yet tried his or her hand at it.
The first portion of the book explores the topics that are needed for effective ASP component development. Because developers find themselves using more than a single language tool, the balance of the book focuses on ASP component development implementing a variety of languages. According to Powers, "This book is unusual in that it covers one subject--writing components for ASP--using five different programming languages: Perl, Basic, Pascal, Java, and C++. There's also coverage of PerlScript, VBScript, and JavaScript."
Developing ASP Components will help the reader develop components for the ASP/COM+/Windows 2000 (and ASP.NET) environment using the reader's language of choice. The book provides a thorough guide for the developer who has worked with one of the target languages/tools, but has not created COM objects before, or has not worked with developing ASP components or ASP applications.
What the critics said about the first edition:
"For the developer wanting to create their own ASP components, this book provides an excellent starting point and technical reference resource. It's accurate, readable and well organized. Looking at the errata lists on the O'Reilly web site exposes the high level of accuracy and attention to detail that have gone into this book. Almost all of the corrections are in the further reading sections that accompany each chapter and most are changed URLs (which is more a reflection of the problems associated with the web than the quality of the book) What more can be said, if you are serious about writing your own ASP components, take a look at this book."
--Dave Rutlidge, Cvu, February 2001"Provides a good introduction to ASP components to those familiar with VB, C++ or Java and their respective IDEs. It's a practical tutorial that extends ASP and brings you up to speed quickly and painlessly."
--fatbrain.com, Aug 1999"This is THE ASP book of 1999. Lucid, detailed. Great for beginners, full of substance for experts. Component building in 3 languages:C++, Java, and Visual Basic. Microsoft Transaction Server covered beautifully as well. Find out why Charles Carroll calls Shelly Powers the component goddess."
--Charles Carroll, www.activeserverpages.com
Online Resources:
Chapter 10, Server-Side XML Through VB ASP Components, is available free online.
More information about the book, including Table of Contents, index, author bio, and samples.
A cover graphic in jpeg format.
By Shelley Powers
2nd Edition, March 2001
ISBN 1-56592750-8, 864 pages, $49.95 (US)
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1-800-998-9938
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