ASP book recommendation for a PHP coder

Hi everyone,

I'm a PHP coder over 3 years of experience. For a good client of mine, I need to learn ASP for his project and I have to learn it fast

So I was wondering if any of you ASP developers can give ma a good book recommendation ? I already have advanced knowledge in PHP/JavaScript & MySQL. So I don't need a beginner level book but a crash-course like book which won't start telling me what an array/variable is but instead start directly with intermediate/advanced ASP features. I hope there some books out there for people switching from other languages such as PHP/Java to ASP. I guess almost all ASP projects also use MS-SQL as database back-end. Some introduction on MS-SQL transactions would also be very nice.

I would highly appreciate your help on a good book recommendation as time is tight and I have to start programming on ASP in a few weeks !


Thanks in advance,
irfan

Do you have any experience in Visual Basic? If so, you are already there. ASP can be used ton interact with the entire database gamut, Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL, DB2, MS Access and so on.
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If you are looking for crash course material start here: http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/
If you have specific questions just post and we will see if we can help.
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Hello victorpendleton,

thanks for quick reply. Mainly I am looking for a good book teaching ASP but as already know one server side programming language [PHP] I just don't want the book to teach me what an array or session is. Learning from the tutorials is fine for me as I have learned PHP from tutorials and from PHP manual, but as time is tight for me I can not spare the time to learn from tutorials, it takes too much time to collect tutorials from the web.

So what I need essentially is a book that teaches me advanced concepts like how to program a portal/shopping cart application etc... but not teaching me programming logic or what an array means. As I have done these kinds of things [portals/e-commerce sites] many times in PHP, I don't think it will be too difficult for me to do the same in ASP. Although syntaxes are different, you still have to track down the users by sessions, insert dynamic data in database etc. But learning from the book is much faster for me, because you have all the necessary information in the book.

I had studied some visual basic long time ago, so I hope the syntax won't be too much difficult for me. I already have good knowledge of JavaScript and AFAIK javascript syntax closely resembles Vbasic syntax.

As for the database issue, I guess I'll have to learn using MS-SQL as MS-SQL is always found on servers for sites with ASP support, isn't it so ?

Not written in stoned but where there is ASP MS SQL is a likely DB.
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If it books you need, try here.
http://www.asp-programming.com/wrox2.asp

I have found the Wrox books generally very good, for medium-advanced levels.
ASP 3.0 Programmer's Reference (ISBN 1-861003-23-4) and ASP Databases (ISBN 1-861002-72-6) I can personally vouch for as coming in handy more than once.
Besides SQL Server, Access is a very commonly used DB for smaller applications and for development.

Several very complete web sites might also come in handy: http://www.asp-help.com/objects/, The Official Transact SQL Reference at Microsoft (very complete and useful, I find), and the W3Schools tutorials both for ASP and for ADO - ActiveX Data Objects - database connections.

I have found (through necessity) the other way around, from ASP to PHP, that the differences, in the end, are much less than they originally seem.
Good luck, and may your biggest problem be the stray semicolons you keep inserting at line ends...

I am a fan of the ASP 3.0 Programmer's Reference as well.

Check out
http://www.w3schools.com/asp/default.asp

There is some stuff in there that you might want to skip but there is a lot of information.

Do you know what language you plan on writing your ASP in? You could do it in Jscipt but the problem is that almost every book/tutorial I've read teaches how to write it in VBscript. If you are exerienced you could probably pick VBscript up pretty quick, the same site has a tutorial on VBscript as well:

http://www.w3schools.com/vbscript/default.asp

even though it covers all the basic stuff you may not want to learn you can look at it and learn VBscript syntax.